Der Fuhrer had a plan, we all knew it. We trusted his genius as much as we trusted our mothers. What the plan was, we were not sure, but the word among the men was that it had been delivered in a sealed envelope to the front weeks before, and all units had subsequently shifted their positions. From the view on the ground, nothing much had changed. We were no longer moving forward, but slipping back. Himmler was behind us, and the Allies in front. As we held our line near the borders of the Black Forest, the River Rhine provided the divider of both comfort and fear; if we had to guard our lines so hard here…here where it had all begun…what had become of the Reich? We sensed that the winds had shifted forever, and Germany would never rule the world. But we would not speak of such things aloud. Nor would we admit that we feared we would soon no longer rule even Germany. Nobody could mouth the thought that in trying to conquer Europe, we would lose our fatherland.
The war for Germany had changed from a victory march to a protective retreat. And then our own ragged company was pressed against our own private wall of desperation.
“Enemy at 4 o’clock!” Schmitt yelled, and we dove for cover. Not fast enough. Around my head the shells sang like dinosaur hornets, loud as thunder yet small as November hail. A scream sprayed the air in blood and I dropped to my chest, gun at the ready and instantly moving along the dusk of the horizon, searching for a target. I couldn’t even look back to see who had been hit. There was no time. This was the most dangerous hour; trapped and pinned without any knowledge of where the attacker was holed up. Any move could open you to death; any inaction could leave your back exposed to a bullet. I pivoted on my belly like a cannon, looking for airborne death.
Fire exploded in tiny flashes from the woods all around, and it only took me seconds to realize we were surrounded. With every staccato bang-bang-bang-bang fire of a machine gun blast I heard another comrade scream bloody horrible death into the funeral of the day.
We were dropping with the lead and somewhere, Colonel Cullen bellowed for the company to fall back. Peter and Fritz clapped my thighs and began to shimmy backwards in the fallen dust of leaves. I pushed back with my hands and tried to follow, never taking my eyes off the shadows of the woods ahead. Pops and flashes still cascaded from the darkness there, and soon, as the brush began to obscure my view, I caught glimpses of the enemy slipping in and out of the trees like pale green ghosts.
Between my shaking fingers and the stalking ghosts, lay the bloody bodies, Becker and Dannenberg and Klein. Lange gasped and coughed just yards from my grasp, his breath a scarlet mist in the air as he convulsed and shook on the ground, blood spreading around him as if he was but a soda bottle, shattered and broken.
Whispers from behind me, and barks of direction ahead. I scrabbled backwards through the forest, slipping into the shadows and hopefully following close behind my comrades. They had hit us from three out of four sides; it wouldn’t be hard to discover where the remaining soldiers had vanished. When the tap came on my shoulder and it was safe (somewhat) to rise, I stopped scooting like a landbound crab and turned to run, a kraut whisper of vengeance and fear into the blackness of the Black Forest.
There were seven dead (or left for) from our small company, and six remaining. The winter had not been kind to our number. We crouched around a tiny campfire and prayed that the light wouldn’t give us away. But the weather gripped us with icy hatred, and we could not survive a night without heat.
We pulled our jackets and blankets close and huddled around the tiny fire until we all coughed from the closeness of the smoke and the foul breath of Kretz, who perhaps had not brushed his teeth since grammar school.
It was Dietz who broke the spell.
“You pussies want to run, or you want to win?” he asked.
The moon shone overhead, and Dietz’s face glowed a strange mix of moon-sewn blue and fire-glow orange.
“Win,” I remember croaking. From somewhere in the distance, I heard the echo of more gunfire.
“Are you sure?” he asked. Dietz was the ultimate stereotype of a German: shock-white hair, wide glacier eyes, and a granite chin that said,
Don’t even think of defying me.
I met his gaze and nodded. Around me, I felt the other five do the same. We had been cut in half over the past month, and then today, cut in half again. We were tired and cold, hungry and fearful that the end was just a day or an hour away. We bled from a hundred cuts and could have laid down to sleep without waking for 40 hours. We were spent. When the next faraway gunshot hit like a firecracker, three of our number dove for the ground without a thought. We were beaten and broken.
And worst of all, afraid.
Once, we had fought fearsome and fearlessly for the honor and glory of the fatherland. Now, every night Kretz lay awake in his sleeping bag, holding the photo of his girl above his eyes as his cries echoed throughout the camp without restraint. Nobody dared say anything. We may not all have cried openly, but we were all dying inside.
The war was lost, we felt it, but we were still on the front, left to kill or be killed. We kept our ammunition ready and prayed that the sour, ancient ghosts of the forest wouldn’t steal our lives before the enemy. Spirits were still more frightful than bullets.
At times I felt completely alone among our company; I had no family to return to, no girl crying in her pillow with my name salty wet on her lips. If I died here in the mud and ice, nobody would really care.
Still…I didn’t relish the idea of dying, for der Fuhrer, or anyone else. I believed in the Fatherland, but I didn’t honestly want to die for it. I think that set me apart from the others as well; they seemed to talk of Germany with a prayer of worship on their lips. Maybe their family and friends and
fraulines
made the land more solid in their hearts. In mine, it was just where I had lived. Where I had lived but never found happiness.
I fingered the symbol of the Third Reich on my breast and nodded at Dietz. He grinned, a wide, white flash of bone.
“I know of a way,” he repeated. His eyes glowed in the dark shadow of the Black Forest. Perhaps it was just the reflection of the fire.
Or perhaps it was really something more. Something preternaturally evil. I’ll never know. But we stood there, encamped at the edge of an ancient place. A place that housed the Lorelei, and ghosts of legend that harbored no pleasant dreams for mortal men. The Black Forest sheltered dark things that most men had never seen, and never hoped to see.
When Dietz began to whisper there, above the fire, and beneath the moon, we all leaned in to listen.
I never wanted to have anything to do with killing a child. When we marched into the tiny village of Kunstler, it was the farthest thing from my mind. Actually, the only thing close to my mind at this point was sleep. We’d talked most of the night about Dietz’s plan, and argued about the potential for its failure or success. I was skeptical, never having had a great faith in god or man. Or devil. But Schuster seemed completely sold. I saw him whispering in Dietz’s ear as we trudged through the dawn of the forest, searching for a place to safely rest. And Lichtmann, all wan and thin and fragile-looking; his eyes had sparked at the description of the ritual. In the end, we were hungry, and scared and lost in every possible soul-searing way. We would have grasped at anything to leave our patrol on the ragged border of the Black Forest. Every moment we blinked betrayed a glint of light to the enemy and opened us to death. Sometimes, death was preferable to the fear of its finality. With such a dark weight on our shoulders, and hopelessness in our hearts, we’d agreed to give Dietz’s magic a go. We broke camp and marched as silently as we could through the forest, feet crunching like relentless vengeance through the snow.
Angels of death on the road to war were we.
The destination, turned out to be Kunstler.
Winter dawned for the hundredth time over a rime of crusty snow beneath frozen feet. And with crunching and cracking and gasping and moaning, we pushed through. Lichtmann’s breath came like the reports of battle through clenched lips, and Schuster murmured something with almost every step. I relied on numbers to get me through. With every step I counted, focusing not on the cold or the murder that trailed behind our necks, ready to blast at any moment. I focused on 39 and 40 and 41. And 52 and 54. And 88. When I reached 100, I put hands to my knees, drew a clean cold breath, and with a knife of air in my lungs, began the count from 1 again.
So we passed the morning. Me counting, Lichtmann gasping.
Dietz found the clearing of Kunstler long before we saw it.
“Do you smell that?” he asked.
Five noses sniffed loudly in the air. A pack of dogs.
“Bacon!” Kretz whispered.
We took off on a jog towards the smell.
Kunstler was a town without a population.
The Black Forest slipped away beneath our feet from a crust of snow to a dirt-path road that led in a wavering snake path to a small circle of three buildings. One of them exhibited a sign of occupation; the white smoke of habitation slid silently from a chimney to the sky and a flame of light beamed from a wood-crossed window. The other buildings looked as cold and dark as the forest we’d just left behind. Apparently you could number the denizens of Kunstler on one hand. We knew where to run.
I will hear the voice of the woman in my head until the day that I die.
“Guten Tag,” she beamed, obviously relieved to see countrymen as she answered our knocks. “Has the war come to our doorstep?”
“To your very home,” Dietz said, and without another word, slammed his gun against her head, knocking her to the floor like a broken pot. Lichtmann gasped. “What the hell are you doing!” he screamed. Dietz cuffed him and the private fell back like a wounded cur.
“In war there are victims and victories,” Dietz declared. “It is time for us to make both.”
In the dark of the hopeless night, we had agreed to find a victim; a sacrifice for the Reich. It already seemed oddly remote. The plan a foolish dream of darkness.
But Dietz had not given up.
“She is a countryman,” Lictmann cried. “She is who we are here to protect.”
“Her name will be etched on the wall of heroes,” Dietz said, and kicked the door open, waiving his gun ahead to dissuade any who would resist him. There were no takers.
We filed into the tiny shack in the woods, and just as we were almost all inside, the gunfire began.
“Oh damn!” screamed Peter, and I knew from the pitch of his voice that he’d been hit. He fell hard to the threshold.
Dietz motioned us inside and out of the way, and then reached out to grab Peter’s hands. He pulled the youth inside, and we all saw the reason for his cries. Peter’s thigh bled like a stuck pig—fountains of crimson were spurting to pool in the wake of his body with every heartbeat.
“Tourniquet!” screamed Schuster and Dietz shook his head. “No shit,” he growled, and ripped off his own shirt to tear its tail into ribbons. Someone shut the door, and I helped Dietz hold Peter’s leg down so that he could tie off the leg and staunch the bleed of the artery.
The others mumbled and paced nervously behind us.
We had fought together, most of us, for the past 18 months. And over the past 18 days, we had lost twice as many friends as now stood here in this tiny wood shack. We were cold and tired. Most of all, our souls were broken. We wanted the war to be over. We wanted Germany to win. But mostly, we wanted to be back with our families. Or, in my case, just back to our freedom. I wanted to drink a beer in quiet, and read a book without looking over my shoulder for death. I wanted to feel the hearth at my feet and hear the hum of humanity at my back. I didn’t want to save them; I wanted to live among them.
Dietz’s shirt was a sopping mess of blood, but the flow was more or less staunched. We stood around Peter and wondered:
What next?
The woman had not stirred from the floor where Dietz had knocked her. Schuster bent to listen to her chest. When he rose, he shook his head. “She’s dead,” he said.
From outside, another stream of bullets pecked at the wood of the roof and doors. Splinters showered the floor. Dietz propped a gun at Peter’s shoulder and commanded him to keep watch. He didn’t move him an inch from the spot where we’d dragged him inside.
“Let’s go,” Dietz said. “Someone else must be here.”
We found her upstairs. They were creaky, rickety, do-it-yourself planks of stairs, but they rose from the rough planks of the kitchen up to a small loft above the family room and hearth. Dietz led the way as bullets continued to ping sporadically outside. We ignored the distraction and took the stairs up to the loft with him. At least we were
doing
something for a change.
As I neared the top, something shuffled in the darkness, and Dietz flipped off the stair to crouch on the plank floor.
“Show yourself,” he demanded. He held the gun up for emphasis, but did not shoot. That would only alert the enemy to our presence.
We flung ourselves around the ladder to land on the floor beside him, guns at the ready. Again a rustle from the back of the loft. “Put your hands in the air or we will shoot,” Dietz screamed.