The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (40 page)

After ten minutes, the platoon enters an apple orchard. Within ten steps of the boundary they encounter fire from a big farmhouse seventy yards away. The platoon splits instantly into three squads which seemingly by instinct head left, right, and charge the center. Bandy freezes for a moment, left without the training to go one way or the other. He dives to the ground and finds himself alone and in the open.

Out of the farmhouse a bank of rifles opens up. Bullets spray everywhere, not well aimed. From one second-floor window a streak of smoke issues and misses trees until it crashes into a big trunk twenty yards ahead of where Bandy lies. The Germans have
Panzerfaust
antitank grenades. The tree cracks in the middle and teeters, flame in its branches.

The platoon moves up in grand fashion, answering the fire from the farmhouse, getting in position to take the building from all sides.

The lieutenant pauses in his rush forward. He drops a knee and turns back to Bandy. He shouts.

“Mr. Bandy, you’d best run somewhere!”

The farmhouse looks like a storage place for fireworks that have gone off;
Panzerfaust
smoke trails erupt out of several windows, muzzle flashes from automatic weapons and carbines jitter in every aperture. Whoever’s inside is squeezing whatever triggers they can get their hands on. Some of them are intended for Bandy.

He jumps to his feet, girding himself for another open run. His objective is a pile of cordwood thirty yards ahead, just beyond the burning tree. He takes off. The Leica waves in his left hand, the Speed Graphic bounces in his backpack against his spine like a worrisome and ignored old friend tapping him, Hey, let me out, use me some!

Bandy fixes his eyes on the pile of wood. Once behind it, he’ll sit tight until this farmhouse is taken. The people inside the house are nuts. They’re firing at everything. Bullets tear into the branches twenty feet over Bandy’s head.

Only a few more running strides to cover. Bandy thinks he’ll make it. He always makes it.

His right thigh trips him. An electric pain rips into his leg and splashes like barbed shock over his whole body. The Leica flies from his hand and skids to the woodpile. Bandy falls forward, pitching in the air—somehow deftly, instinctively—onto his left side to avoid landing on the bullet wound. The ground receives him hard, jamming his bad shoulder, the one he’d hurt on his Spanish jump six years ago. Bandy skids and even before he loses momentum from the running fall he crawls.

The right leg will not move. It will, but just one try to incorporate it into his fast slither toward cover is enough to tell him it’s best to rely only on the good leg, so he drags it. His left shoulder feels like a giant is pinching him. Damn, he thinks. He tries for better language than a garden variety curse, he wants some inspiration or thought of note to mark his first battle wound, but all that arrives in his head is
damn.
Shit. This hurts.

Finally leaning his back against the woodpile, Bandy takes stock. The inside of his right pants leg is torn in the meat of his thigh. Another few inches higher. Damn. Christ. With careful fingers he pulls back the bloody cloth flaps and peers in. He sucks through clamped teeth, the electricity in the wound is still on.

Lucky. He’s got a nasty gash, a perfect C the size of an 8mm bullet carved out of his flesh. The wound is dumping blood pretty fast, dribbling a rivulet that pools under his knee. Bandy’s fingers are red, tacky from probing.

The cut smarts like it’s embedded with thorns. He has no bandage and the medic is with the platoon assaulting the farmhouse. Bandy doesn’t bother to listen to the battle going on beyond the woodpile. He unbuttons his coat. He slides out of it with grinding discomfort, his left shoulder is deeply wrenched and swelling fast. He slides one sleeve of the jacket under his hemorrhaging leg and knots it tight with the other sleeve around the wound. He’s sweating by the time he is done. A minute ago he was running for cover, Charles Bandy,
Life
photographer on the scene east of the Rhine. Now he’s beat to hell with one good leg and one good arm.

He waits like this for another five minutes. His pulse beats so strong out of the wrapped leg, he feels like a clock. The noises of combat flow around the stacked wood. Men’s voices ricochet among the trees. Over there! Move, move, move! Leaves rustle, sticks break under galloping boots. Rifles bay. Bullets strike glass, dirt, bark, the siding of the farmhouse. The orchard husbands all these sounds to itself. Bandy, blinded by cover, his eyes shut in pain, hears every developing detail and for once does not concern himself with what it looks like.

Finally the fighting wanes with the easing clop-clop of a reined-in horse. When the orchard is still, voices emanate from the farmhouse.

“Nicht schiessen! Wir kommen aus!”

Boys’ voices. High, choirboy voices.

Bandy can’t believe it. No. Not true.

He’s been shot by children.

He wants to stand, to roll over, he wants to see for himself who shot him. To see if it wasn’t even a man, a real enemy soldier, who got him. After all these years in combat he deserved at least that much. But Bandy hears no mature voices emerging from the farmhouse. The paratroopers rush forward, shouting, to take the surrender.

“Hände hoch!”
The GI lieutenant speaks some German. He orders the prisoners to put their hands up. Then he adds,
“Schnell, Kinder.”

Quickly, kiddies.

Bandy puts his hand to his forehead, slurring blood there. He mutters to himself, “Oh, I don’t fucking believe this.”

He can’t stand it. He rolls over to his left, bad shoulder protesting, and once clear of the wood sees a dozen teenagers, some of them perhaps even younger, all thin and fair-skinned. Each one wears a black SS clone uniform, with silver braided piping and eagle patches. Their hands are high and empty. None wears a helmet, they have caps or are bareheaded. Only two or three have boots, the rest shuffle in street shoes. The paratroopers surround them, guns aimed. Bandy hears sniffles from the boys. One openly bawls with a cardinal face.

These children were allowed by the Nazis to play dress-up. They were given an arsenal and told to use it on the Americans. And they did. When they ran out of ammo or they suffered enough casualties, they threw up their hands and came out cringing. How much of Germany’s youth is Hitler willing to sacrifice to defend his lost lousy cause? If he can do this, he’s desperate and capable of anything. He’s a bigger bastard and even more dangerous than Bandy imagined. What else will we find, he wonders, the closer we get to Berlin?

Bandy doesn’t see the medic. He’s embarrassed to do it, but he calls out.

“Hey. Medic!”

One of the sergeants comes over.

“Hey, pal. You okay?”

“Sort of. No.”

“Hang on. Doc’s busy.”

The sergeant squats to inspect Bandy’s wound and makeshift dressing.

“You’re gonna be all right.”

“I reckon.”

The soldier stands to go back to corralling the Hitler boys.

Bandy says, “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“How many were there? In the farmhouse. Any regular soldiers?”

“No. Just these. We killed five before they came out.”

Bandy nods.

The soldier says, “I hate this. I goddam hate this.”

The man is not curious for Bandy’s reaction. Though Bandy has been hit, this soldier has killed children. His wound will never heal. The sergeant mulls over his own words for a moment and decides no more are needed. He spits and starts to walk off.

Bandy grabs his Leica off the ground.

“Sarge.”

The soldier stops.

“Gimme a hand up, will ya?”

“You want to take pictures, Mr. Bandy?”

Yes, he does.

“No. No, I just ... I just want to see them.”

The paratrooper wraps a strong arm around Bandy’s back and lifts. Bandy pushes one-legged and rises with a choked groan. The knotted coat flaps and drags the ground behind him. The sergeant grips Bandy’s shoulder. This sets off a howl. The soldier sets him back on the ground.

“Separated,” Bandy huffs. “It’s separated. Jesus. Gimme a minute.”

The sergeant looms over Bandy rocking on his butt. Without ceremony he reaches down and grips Bandy’s left arm. Bandy can’t stop him.

“No! Wait!”

The sergeant anchors himself against Bandy’s good shoulder and yanks. The left joint pops in his heavy grip. Bandy feels torn apart, then just as suddenly the pain ebbs.

“Ahhh. Ahhh, for Christ’s sake, Sarge. Jesus.”

“Better?”

“Yeah, but Jesus.”

The soldier lifts him with the same strength he held Bandy down a moment ago. Together they walk to the farmhouse, Bandy hobbled and leaning on the paratrooper’s arm. Cooled blood trickles down Bandy’s calf into his sock and boot. The leg pain is no more acute walking than it was when he was sitting still. He’ll have the memento of a mean scar, that should be the extent of the injury. His shoulder grabs most of his attention. It’s fixed, yes, but banging at him.

Twenty yards ahead stand fourteen German boys in a cluster. Their hands are on their heads and they are surrounded by stone-faced paratroopers and leveled rifles. More than one of the children has broken into tears. The oldest boy can’t be more than sixteen.

Their eyes move to Bandy and his obvious bleeding. On a few captured faces he catches proud sneers. On most there is only relief. He wishes he could take these pictures, of fanatical delusion and weepy release, of childhood gone off the tracks.

The sergeant lugs him past the boys, around to the side of the farmhouse. There, on the edge of the orchard, a crowd of troopers stands about a man spread on the ground and the kneeling medic.

When the men see Bandy approach limping on the sergeant’s arm, they part to let him into their circle. The medic does not look up from the young caterpillar-moustached soldier lying beside him.

The boy has been shot in the neck. The medic has wrapped gauze around the wounds; blood blotches the white bandage on both sides of the soldier’s throat. The bullet tore all the way through. The medic is busy with crimson hands unwrapping a plasma pack. Another soldier holds ready a morphine spike.

The flush that was in the young soldier’s freckles on the transport plane has faded. His face is ashen, the freckles have receded as though they too are being bled white.

His eyes are focused straight up. But he sees Bandy and rolls his head. The medic rips open the plastic plasma packet, stabs a needle into the soldier’s arm, and plugs him in.

Somehow, in the midst of the boy’s own unfolding and dire fate, he smiles at Bandy. Weakly, he lifts a fist just off the ground to give one more thumbs-up.

Bandy returns the gesture. He shakes his own balled hand as if to rattle out some strength and good luck to the downed boy. To pour a little more sand into his hourglass.

The boy’s gaze slides down to the Leica in Bandy’s hand. His blanched face changes, winces not in pain but refusal.

As he did just twenty minutes ago in the commotion of the plane, the young soldier mouths silent words to Bandy:

Don’t take my photograph. Okay?

~ * ~

March 25, 1945, 2:30
p.m.

On the west bank of the Rhine