Ordinary Heroes (43 page)

"Wie geht's?" he asked, manifestly more at ease now that he was back among his own. He thought I spoke more German than I did. I'd been muddling along with my grandparents' Yiddish, and I answered only with a shrug. Even at that, I felt I was a coward. He had perfect blue eyes and he looked at me a moment longer. "Bald schiessen wir nicht mehr," he whispered and gave me a weary smile. He was saying that the shooting was going to be over soon, and didn't seem to hold any illusion he would be on the winning side.

We marched most of the morning. I don't know where the Germans thought they were headed, probably to bolster more of the troops we could hear fighting, but they never got there. As we passed a wood, an American armored cavalry unit appeared out of nowhere. Six Shermans rolled in literally from every direction with their big guns leveled. The German commander surrendered without a shot. Apparently, he had the same view of the war's progress as the lieutenant.

The American troops rushed forward. The Germans who'd been our captors were forced to their knees with their hands behind their heads
,
while we were greeted like heroes. Two of the men who'd been prisoners had minor wounds, and they were whisked off for medical attention. The rest of us were loaded on a truck and transported to the regimental headquarters, while the Germans marched at gunpoint in the rear. This was the 66th Tank Regiment of the 4th Armored Division. While most of the division had been allowed a respite in Luxembourg after Bastogne, these tankers had been brought in to flank the 87th Infantry. They were doing one hell of a job as far as I was concerned.

Their mobile headquarters, about two miles behind the lines where we'd been captured, consisted of an array of squad tents in a snowy field. Each of the freed Americans was interviewed by regimental G-2. Since I had been the lone officer in captivity, the staff G-z, Major Golsby, interviewed me personally in his tent. He was confused about my orders, which I still had in my pocket, the only thing the Germans hadn't taken.

"I have to go back to Third Army JAG," I told him. If the MPs hadn't found Martin and Gita by now, there was no point in pursuing them now that they had another two days' lead time. More important, I had lost all interest in the mission. I knew as a matter of historical fact that it was my fault Bidwell was dead. My adolescent fascination with both Martin and Gita had led, as tragic errors alway
s m
ust, to tragedy--to combat, capture, and now Biddy's grave.

When I told Golsby what had happened to him, I realized I sounded remote. "I bawled my eyes out yesterday," I added. It was an absolute lie. I was yet to shed a tear. Instead, all my grief about Biddy had energized another of those circling thoughts, this one about why I'd never gotten around to telling him to call me David.

"They shot a POW?" he asked me, repeating the question a few times. "Unarmed? Stay here." He returned with Lieutenant Colonel Coleman, the deputy regimental commander. He looked like a former football player, big and stocky and quick to anger, and he was angry now, as he should have been, at my account of how Biddy died.

"Who did this to your sergeant? Are the men here who did this? Did we capture them?"

Coleman ordered a second lieutenant and a sergeant to accompany me through the camp to look for the SS men. The sergeant was carrying a Thompson submachine gun. The weapon was uncommon enough that I wondered if it was mine, reacquired from the Germans who'd taken it. The captured Krauts had just arrived on foot and were seated in rows with their hands clasped behind their heads. The MPs had made them remove their boots to safeguard against any effort to run. I walked u
p a
nd down the rows. I had no illusions about what was going to happen.

The SS man who'd killed Bidwell saw me coming. Our eyes had found each other's almost mechanically several times in the last two days. I would steal hateful glances at him, but when his gaze caught mine, I hurriedly looked away, knowing he was easily provoked. Now it was he who turned in the other direction. He wasn't very old, I realized, perhaps twenty-one.

This one," I told the second lieutenant.

"Get up." The second lieutenant kicked the German's foot. "Get up."

The German was not going to die well. "Ich babe nichts getan." I have done nothing. He shouted it again and again.

The second lieutenant told him to shut up.

"Were there others with him?" I looked down the rows. I found three more, including the German lieutenant who had told me the shooting would end soon. He raised his perfect blue eyes to me, a single look of dignified entreaty, then cast his glance down. He had been at war too long to believe in much.

The four were marched, shoeless in the snow, back to the Lieutenant Colonel. Two of the Germans were virtually barefoot, their socks worn through at the toes.

"Which one did it?" Coleman demanded.

I pointed.

Coleman looked at the man, then withdrew his pistol and put it to the German's temple. The young SS soldier wept and shouted out in his own language yet again that he had done nothing. But he was too frightened to withdraw his head even an inch from the gun barrel.

Coleman watched him blubber with some satisfaction, then holstered his sidearm. The German went on heaving, his protests continuing, albeit in a reduced voice.

"Take them in back," Coleman said to the second lieutenant. I followed along, entirely a spectator, suddenly uncertain about what was to occur. I had been afraid that the Lieutenant Colonel was going to offer me the gun, but I had been disappointed when he decided not to pull the trigger. Now it seemed for the best.

The second lieutenant led the men behind. Coleman's tent at the boundary of the camp and ordered the four to turn around with their hands behind their heads. He looked toward me, not long enough to allow much in the way of a reaction, then pointed to the sergeant with the tommy gun, which seemed to have begun firing almost before the weapon was aimed. Afterward, I figured that the sergeant had just wanted to get it over with. A thought arose to say a word for the German lieutenant, but I didn't. The machine gun's spastic bar
k r
esounded in the quiet camp and the four Germans went down like puppets cut from their wires.

At the sound, the Lieutenant Colonel came around the tent. Coleman walked along inspecting the four bodies. "Rot in hell," he told them.

I had watched all of this, there and not there. I had been unable to move since the Germans fell. I had been so pleased by the SS man's terror. Now it was as if I was groping around within myself, trying to find my heart.

Chapter
27.

LONDON

February 5, 1945

Dear Folks--

R & R in London. I have a chance at last to describe what we have been through, but at the moment I am in no mood to relive any of it. The war goes well, and I have done my part. But in thinking over everything I have seen, I cannot imagine how I will return home anything but a pacifist. Military calculations are so tough-minded--they must be, clear-eyed determinations of how to win and who must die. But employing the same kind of unsentimental reasoning, it is hard to understand how war--at least this war--has been worthwhile. The toll of daily oppression
Hitler would wreak on several nations, even for years, cannot equal the pain an
d d
estruction that is being caused in stopping him. Yes, Europe would be in prison. But it is in rubble instead. And is a matter of government worth the millions upo
n m
illions of lives lost to this carnage? I came thinking that freedom has no price. But I know now that it is only life about which this may truly be said.

I send my love to all of you. I cannot wait to be with you again.

David

I
returned to Third Army Headquarters in Luxembourg City on February 1, 1945. Because the Luxembourgers were regarded as inappropriately accommodating to the Germans, Patton had treated them with little sympathy and had literally turned out the elderly residents of the national old people's home, the Fondation Pescatore, taking it for his headquarters. It was a castle-size structure of orange limestone squares and, with its two projecting wings, vast enough to accommodate both the forward
-
and rear-echelon staffs. Colonel Maples had been favored with a third-floor salon, where invalids formerly sunned in the banks of high windows, and he was extremely pleased with his surroundings. He walked me to the glass to ensur
e t
hat I saw his view of the dramatic gorge that plunged several hundred feet, bisecting Luxembourg City. The furnishings in his office, like those of others in the senior staff, had been provided by a cousin of the Grand Duc's, whose generosity only enhanced the suspicion that he had collaborated with the Germans. The Colonel took a moment to point out the gold-mottled tortoise-shell inlay on his desk and credenzas, priceless heirlooms created in the time of Louis Quatorze by the cabinetmaker Boulle. Logs blazed in the marble fireplace, beside which the Colonel and I drew up two damask-covered chairs. The contrast to the frozen holes in which I had been dwelling only weeks ago was unavoidable, but my mind seemed incapable of making anything from it. There were no conclusions, except that life and, surely, war were absurd, something I already felt as palpably as the bones within my body.

The Colonel leaned forward to clasp my shoulder. You look a little worse for wear, David. Thinne
r a
nd perhaps not the same bright look in your eye." "No, sir."

"I've seen some papers for medals. You've done quite remarkably."

I recounted my failures for the Colonel. I'd lost the best man I'd met in the service and let Martin get away as the result of my own cupidity. This candor was characteristic of my exchanges with virtually everyone. I steadfastly rejected the fawning of colleagues like Tony Eisley, even while I became quietly furious with one or two people who treated me as if I'd been AWOL or, worse, on vacation. The truth was that no one's reactions pleased me. But because Colonel Maples had fought across the trenches a quarter century ago, a bit of my perpetual bitterness eased in his presence. If anything, my respect for him, never insubstantial, had increased, knowing he had volunteered to return to war. I would never do that. Nor could I imagine acquiring his avuncular grace. Today I could only picture myself as an irascible old man.

The Colonel, with his soft gray eyes, listened for a while.

"You are grieving, David. No one ever mentions that as an enduring part of war. You need some time.

I was given two weeks R & R. Most officers on leave retreated to Paris, where the joy of liberation was enshrined in an atmosphere of guiltless debauchery, but that hardly fit my mood. I chose London, where I found a tiny hotel room off Grosvenor Square. I had made no plans other than to sit in a hot tub for hours, and to review the foot of mail that had awaited me in Luxembourg City. I wanted to sleep, read a few novels, and when I was able, write several letters.

In retrospect, I suppose I had crossed the Channel with the unspoken thought of again being whoever
I was before I'd set foot on the Continent. But the war followed me. I'd barely slept longer than two or three hours in a row since Biddy and I had first been dispatched to arrest Martin. Now I was startled to find that I could not sleep at all. I had not spent a night entirely alone within solid walls for months, and I had the feeling they were encroaching. Often I couldn't even stand to close my eyes. The second night I bought a bottle of scotch. But several belts did not make things any better. The ghouls of war took control. Each time I drifted off some panicked sensory recollection raced at me--the keening of incoming artillery, the sight of Collison with his intestines in his bloody hands, the three holes in Biddy's stomach, the earthquake and thunder of the 88s, or the unbearable cold of Champs. And always there were the dead and, worse, the dying, screaming to be saved.

In the aftermath of all that, I guess I expected to feel some gratitude for being alive. But life had been a far sweeter affair without being confronted by the dread of extinction. I had become so accustomed to being afraid that fear was now a second skin, even in the relative safety of London. I awaited artillery blasts in the parks, snipers in every tree. I was ashamed of my fear, and frequently angry. I wanted to be alone, because I was not sure I could treat anyone else decently.

The letters I expected to write came hard. S
o m
uch seemed beyond words. I wrote to Biddy's family for more than two days, draft after draft, and ended up with something barely longer than a note. I found it impossible to describe the bathos of his death, hoping to comfort a dog, after summoning such valor on so many prior occasions. The only solace I could offer was to enclose hundreds of his photographs which I'd gathered from his belongings. I promised to visit the Bidwells, if I was lucky enough to return alive. In the days that I had composed and recomposed this letter, I had envisioned putting the pen down at the end and, in utter privacy, finally sobbing. But I had never been a weeper, even in the later years of childhood, and tears still would not come, leaving me in a state of constipated agitation.

Then there was Grace. In my two days of German captivity, when the combination of Biddy's death and Gita's desertion had left me feeling certain that I was going to die of heartbreak, I'd had second thoughts about Grace. She was beautiful and brilliant and steady. The one thing I could say with utmost sincerity was that I wished that I could see her, because I had learned that presence meant everything. But without a photo in my hand I could barely bring her to mind. If we were together, if Grace were in my arms, then I might have had some chance of retrieving our life. "Here, here, here," I kept repeating to myself whenever I thought of her
,
feeling largely enraged that something so dignifying and eternal as love could be defeated by distance. Yet the memory of Gita, of her bare skin and the moments when we'd seemed to fuse souls, easily withstood whatever had been left behind for thousands of miles and many months. By now, I was willing to say only to my most private self that I did not fully regret Gita. I had told Biddy that I was in love with her. That seemed ludicrous. I had been the kind of fool men often were for sex. But even so, I found certain images of her recurrent and fabulously arousing. Again and again I saw her looming over me naked, stimulating me with unashamed intensity. Fantasies of how I might come to find her again in the burning ruins of Europe revolved through me, even as I sometimes begged myself not to abandon the decent life I knew I could make with Grace. But it was not a time for logic. I desired Gita against all reason, and my inability to control my passions seemed part and parcel of the harsh season I was experiencing within the narrow cold confines of my room.