The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (28 page)

To add to his ordeal, artillery shells begin to fall on all sides of the footbridge. Apparently the Germans have regrouped on some high ground over there near the town and are trying to stem the flow of Americans crossing the Roer. Pillars of water fountain left and right, soaking every soldier on the river. In an instant Bandy is dripping. The frigid water seeps down to his underwear, his skin puckers. The cameras in his pack are wrapped in oilskins, they’re safe so long as he isn’t submerged. The barrage is random, the Germans can’t draw a bead through the smoke. But the crossing is made that much more dangerous. Bandy thinks how just minutes ago he was asleep.

It takes him only six more minutes to cover the second half of the footbridge. Hitting the bank, he steps into sludge that sucks his boots and legs up to the calves. As unhappy as he is, Bandy’s relieved to see so few American bodies. The attack went well, clearly. But the dead lie in such an awful, apocalyptic place, under a greasy haze, half dissolved into the mud. The charge on Berlin is on, the Allies are coursing forward with power and pace. It’s a tragedy to die at all, but a pity to die now with the end in sight. Bandy wants to take pictures. He’s reminded of scenes of World War I, smoke and filth, rushing men. But his hands are too slimy, there’s no dry or clean place on him or anywhere around him. He leaves the cameras in their protection, nods to the dead, and hurries forward with the others who cannot stop, to Jülich.

Bandy struggles in the deep steps of soldiers making their way ahead of him. No one stops to shoot at anything, the Germans have left the bank and fallen back to the town. Through the winter-bare trees appear streets, a steeple, red slate roofs. The drier the ground gets under Bandy’s boots, the clearer are the sounds of battle; near the river all he could hear was the
swoook, swoook
of muddy treads. Behind a clump of bushes, he drops to his knees and takes from his camera bag the 35mm Leica. He loads a roll, slaps the case shut, and sticks three more rolls in his coat pocket. The Leica is Bandy’s action camera, compact and quick to focus, and he can handle it with one hand. The negatives are less crisp than those of the big Speed Graphic, but that’s not a concern this morning. He won’t be photographing faces. The subject will be smoking, crumbling buildings.

On the edge of town Bandy joins a squad of fifteen men. Their assignment is to move up and take a block in the southwestern corner of Jülich. The troops who came over the Roer by boat in the dark didn’t bother to take the town; their task was to keep moving, deeper and deeper, to expand the bridgehead. The second, larger echelon will consolidate the gains.

The American soldiers have reaped the methods of street fighting from France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. Now they know what to do, and because they’re in Germany they take a particular pleasure in doing it.

Bandy squats with the squad in a mound of rubble. About fifty feet away is the first of a row of brick buildings along a wide street. The structures are all two-story, attached. They appear to be businesses mingled with private homes. A sign has been painted in white letters on the wall facing them:
welcome uncle sam. see Germany and die
! Without looking behind him the squad sergeant wags a finger over his shoulder. The two-man bazooka crew skittles forward.

The sergeant says, “My guess is right on that big ol’ G in Germany.”

The two bazooka handlers, grizzled and sable-toothed from tobacco chaws, purse their lips and spit together. Bandy snaps their picture, spittle in midflight. Not publishable, he thinks, but a great shot for his private archive. The twin soldiers arrange themselves, one knee each on the ground. The rest of the squad clear the areas in front and rear. The bigger of the two hefts the bazooka pipe to his shoulder and lays his eye to the sight. The second soldier—a face bearded and squinty; Bandy sees how a shower, a shave, and a weekend in Bermuda would turn him into a handsome man—pats his comrade on the back. He gets a quick helmeted nod and slides in a shell the size of a bread loaf. He ducks, the bazooka recoils with a belch of flame out its tail, the firing man rocks, but the bazooka is firm in his grasp. Across the clearing the building explodes in the same moment. The bazooka stays in place, the crew is ready to fire again if necessary. The rest of the squad get set to rush forward. Smoke swirls out of the way, and the sign reads only
welcome uncle sam.

Someone pulls the pin on a smoke grenade and rolls it into the open. It spews a small cloud bank. Four men scurry out, making slits in the mist, which quickly heals itself. Bandy waits for gunfire. The unit that has dashed inside is rushing from room to room looking for enemy soldiers. They’re kicking in closed doors, going leapfrog down halls, with hand signals and tense trigger fingers.

Around the town, from other blocks, Bandy hears sporadic bursts of gunplay. More thumps of bazooka fire. More Americans pour into the town, Jülich is being swarmed. By afternoon when the heavy bridges are built over the Roer, there’ll be tanks and artillery growling around whatever’s left of the place. Any German soldiers will be dead, captured, or somewhere else. Waiting in the rubble, Bandy takes a photo of the blasted brick wall showing through breezy fissures in the haze. He can read the funny remainder of the message; great story, this shot might get in
Life.
By nightfall there’ll be a command post set up in the best remaining building in town. The brass will move in. Bandy will have a press liaison officer to hand his film to for the flight to London, where the military censors get first crack, then the photo pool, then New York. In the middle of this thought a whistle comes through the smoke. The sergeant leaps first, his Thompson machine gun is leveled and ready. Bandy waits until last and runs through the greasy coils. He rushes with one hand over the Leica strapped around his neck to keep it from flying up and busting him in the nose.

The building is secure. Stepping into the wrecked first floor, Bandy sees it was a home. Everything is smashed. Furniture is splintered, white cushion foam is splattered around like a hundred dead doves. Over the hearth there’s a framed photograph of Adolf Hitler, the glass oddly unbroken by the blast. Below the picture on the mantel are several decorative beer steins with metal caps, the only other things that survived unharmed. A few of the men grab the steins and put them in their rucksacks, then kick through the debris looking for other mementos. A corporal takes down the Führer’s picture. This soldier is mud-caked like the rest of them. He moves not like an invader on foreign land but like a man in his neighborhood bar, slowly and easily. He’s a veteran. He’s got a beer gut, Bandy can’t figure how he maintains that protuberance over here with the exertion and frayed nerves of war. But it makes him look cheery. The corporal throws his belly into his laugh.

“Hey, Pendleton!”

One of the bazooka men answers, the handsome one. “Yeah?”

The corporal hangs Hitler on the intact inner wall that divides the building from the one attached to it.

“I think right on the fucker’s kisser would be nice.”

This is how the platoon works its way to the end of the street, as do all the other Americans who are taking Jülich. They stay off the streets, moving through the cover of buildings, blowing holes in shared walls or across narrow alleys to scoot unseen through the block. At the end of each brick row, when they need to cross a street, they start over: knock an opening in the initial wall, smoke grenade first, then go! The ten thousands of men who died in the streets of the months before are not on their minds right now. But the lessons those men made them learn are.

The squad is done scavenging. They move to the opposite wall, crouching behind upturned chairs, tables, and a sofa. The bazooka crew takes a position as distant from the wall as they can get. Hitler’s image hangs in the center of the target, a determined, thoughtful bull’s-eye, showing the way to his country’s destruction one wall at a time. The man in the rear handles the shell. He pats his partner on the shoulder, gets a nod.

The men of the platoon all shout at the tops of their lungs. They’ve done this before.

“Heil Hitler!”

~ * ~

February 23, 1945, 1430 hours

Six kilometers east of Posen

Poland

ilya watches the boots of the five dozen germans in front
of him.

Their heels shamble on the road through the forest. Livestock walk with more bearing, Ilya thinks. A defeated man loses his honor so fast; even a cow on the way to the abattoir walks with its head up. A rooster squawks with your hand around its throat until you cut it. But a man heading to his fate has imagination. He sees the unseen territory. These men see Siberia. So they shuffle, they stink, they dissolve into captivity. Ilya prefers death to becoming one of these scarecrows.

Yesterday the Germans surrendered. The commander of the Posen garrison laid a Nazi battle flag on the floor in his office inside the citadel and shot himself in the head. What kind of officer does that? It’s desertion in the face of battle. Is that some Prussian notion of honor? Ilya doesn’t fathom these Germans, who fight so ferociously then become unmanned when they lose. A soldier doesn’t have to be victorious to remain a soldier. Duty defines him; do it or don’t do it. Simple. Victory is for politicians and historians.

One of the Germans stumbles. He’s awkward, exhausted, freighted with shame. And well he ought to be, considers Ilya, recalling what he’s seen not on battlefields but in unforgivable places: mass executions in Polish villages, the Majdanek concentration camp, bodies lining the roadways of the German retreat, unmarked mass graves, naked death heaps. One of the men in Ilya’s company kicks the prisoner in the ribs to prod him off the ground and moving again. This German is slow, he’s been battered once before on this march already. He looks starving, like the rest. He gets another kick until a sheepish comrade helps him upright and he continues. Ilya says nothing.

He takes off his stocking cap. His big palm feels bristles over his pate. Time to shave it again. With the battle of the citadel lasting almost a month, there was no time.

Today is Red Army Day, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Soviet force. General Chuikov announced this morning that in Moscow they’ve celebrated the taking of Posen with twenty salvos from over two hundred guns. Ilya rubs his head harder, he is aggravated. He was an officer in the Red Army. Even yesterday, he was a soldier. This afternoon, he’s a shepherd.

The line of captives is becoming too ragged. Ilya wants it straight, for no good reason other than he can’t bring himself to kick the Germans but he can make them march properly. If he’s going to be a damn shepherd.

“Misha. Tell them to firm up.”

A few meters away Misha calls out some command in German. The order has little effect.

“Tell them again.”

Misha strides over to walk beside Ilya. A bandage covers his right cheek and ear. A local Polish doctor helping to treat the Russian wounded stitched him up. Beneath the bandage, Misha has a black row across his cheek like barbed wire.

“It doesn’t matter, Ilyushka. Leave it alone. They’re moving.”

“I want them to march in an orderly fashion.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“Who are you giving orders to?”

Ilya draws out the word.

“You.”

Misha walks, nodding. “I see. And what am I supposed to do, Private? Follow them?”

Ilya crushes his cloth cap in a fist.

Misha asks, “Why’re you in such a foul mood? You’ve been like this since we left Posen.”

Little Misha with his pirate scar forming doesn’t put any distance between him and Ilya, he’s not afraid to stand close beside his gargantuan comrade and question him, even disobey him. Ilya eyes the sixty captives. Walking in a loose cordon outside them are six others from the punishment company, assigned with Ilya and Misha to escort the prisoners on foot twenty kilometers to the rear, to process the Germans for transport to detention. No one else speaks, just bare trees, dragging soles, dust, and eight guns.

“This is shit, Misha.”

“This is an honor, you lunkhead. We took these men prisoner! We stormed their citadel! Marching them to the rear and handing them over is recognition. Pushkov is actually rewarding us with this.”