The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (48 page)

—Ja.

—If there’s any German soldiers around, or any of those crazy bastard kids, tell ‘em to get out of town or lay their guns down.

—Ja, ja.

—Tell him we mean business.

-Ja.

The captain lowers the gun. The burgomaster, who has by now bent himself backward over his desk, straightens up. He adjusts his sash and collar, clears his throat, some rituals of dignity before he acts in his official capacity as traitor. Bandy had to agree not to take any pictures of these scenes before the captain would let him watch. Too bad, he thinks, there’s precious little comedy in war.

The burgomaster dials and reaches his counterpart in the next town, Bevern. According to the Eighty-third’s maps, Bevern’s just a little village five miles to the east on the two-lane road.

But it’s a German village.

None of the American soldiers wants to die or get wounded this close to the end of the war. To have made it this far through all they’ve endured and then be gunned down by some fanatical teenager waiting around a bend. Or blown up in your jeep by a kid hiding in a grove of trees who found an unused
Panzerfaust.
That would be too much, too wasteful, with the war decided. But Hitler has raised a whole generation of children to do just this, to be his “werewolves,” boys and girls who will bleed into a cup for the Führer. There’s not a single fifteen- or sixteen-year-old in Germany who’s ever known any leader but Adolf Hitler. They can’t imagine a world without him.

No. Today is not the day to take chances. Especially not on Easter Sunday.

The burgomaster looks at the floor while he talks to the next burgomaster. The man is animated, waving his free hand in the air telling the next burgomaster how gigantic the American force is. Hundreds of tanks! Thousands of artillery guns. Thousands and thousands of men! The fat official glances up at the captain, currying favor with his eyes and quick, furtive nods, then back down to concentrate on his fairy tale.

Bandy rises, pushing off on his left leg, careful to protect his left arm. The burgomaster gives the okay sign to the American captain, who returns the sign and holsters the Colt. A GI will be left with this burgomaster for a little while just to make sure a trap hasn’t been laid in the village up the road.

Bandy moves outside to the town hall steps. Holzminden looks like a nice small burg. Main street. Shops. Red-tile-roofed houses, gardens. A square with a fountain and statue. A pretty church with a steeple you can see from most of the town. It’s good that Holzminden didn’t have to be blasted and looted. That’s the rule here in the waning days of the war, the days of fast-rolling men and machines, thirty-five-mile-a-day progress, unprecedented advances into enemy territory. If the GIs have to fight for a town, they treat it roughly. Artillery, bazookas, tanks, any firepower it takes to reduce the threat, even if it reduces the town to ruins. These skirmishes are rarely with regular German army units; the
Wehrmacht
sees the writing on the wall and is surrendering in droves. A half million of them have laid down their weapons in the surrounded Ruhr pocket. Instead, the Americans’ confrontations are almost always with Waffen SS stragglers, zealous
Volkssturm,
or Hitler Youth caravanned down from Berlin.

Regardless of who’s shooting back, when the fighting is over, the GIs feel obliged to loot. They walk past whatever corpses they’ve made with callous disregard, the proper disdain for fools, they think. Never do the GIs take more than they can fit in a backpack—jewelry, wine, silver. The favorite booty is Nazi memorabilia. Eyes are always peeled for Lugers, swords, pins, flags. The surviving citizens are well advised to stand aside and shut their mouths, especially if the Americans have taken casualties. But if the town surrenders quietly, the populace is handled with much better care. Often the German civilians are glad to see the Yanks, hosting them to meals and drinks, inviting them to sleep in their beds, packing the soldiers off with gifts. You are welcome here, they say, because you are not the Russians.

The German citizens impress many of the soldiers, Bandy too. Villagers and townsfolk seem educated and hardworking, cleaning bricks and sweeping streets, selling items and food from carts when their stores are destroyed. They stand beside the roads and dirt tracks, jaws dropped at the displays of Allied might and mobility. They lift up their children to see over the crowds. The kids wave, loving trucks and noise and unconcerned with friend or foe. Bandy snaps photos with the 35mm Leica. The big Speed Graphic takes two hands to operate fast enough to catch the breakneck pace of the Allied advance. His left shoulder isn’t up to it just yet.

Inside the burgomaster’s office the negotiations have been concluded. The captain comes out on the steps beside Bandy. The day is bright. No one has died here this morning.

Easter bells ring in the church steeple.

“Mr. Bandy?” the captain asks. “You a believer?”

Soldiers and citizens alike gather in the street to enter the church doors. Services will begin in a few minutes at 1000 hours.

Bandy does not wrestle with the soldiers’ paradox of God. He does not ponder how God can save you from doom via prayer when that same deity allows so many cruelties to exist. Why would God save you from Himself? Bandy is satisfied that his role is to take pictures of God’s design. Bandy spreads news of God’s Word, because in Bandy’s life so much of His Word has been War. Bandy suffers no moral dilemma. In his logic, God rewards him for his faithfulness by giving him Victoria and Tennessee and the Leica.

He smiles at the captain. “You go ahead.”

The officer chuckles and walks down the steps. The man says over his shoulder, “Lot of other fellas might become believers after a bullet misses their nuts by two inches.”

Bandy watches the mingle of soldiers and citizens at the church entrance. He raises the Leica with one hand and fires a few frames. As always, he’s drawn through the lens to the story behind the picture. He decides to go inside the church. Hell, he thinks, it’s Easter.

He picks his way down the town hall steps and enters the street. He winds up limping to the church beside an old man with a cane. The man offers Bandy his cane. Bandy declines, using some of his smattered German,
“Danke, nein, danke schön.”
The man insists and hangs it by the loop over Bandy’s wrist. The old German stands there gesticulating like a man shooing goats out of the road, wanting Bandy to use the cane, impatient that the American resists. Then he turns away and outwalks Bandy to the church.

Inside, the church is full with a few hundred worshipers. The pipe organ plays an entry tune. Soldiers and citizens sit in pews shoulder to shoulder. Rifles are laid rattling on the floor at the soldiers’ feet. Children fidget and giggle when GIs smile and make faces at them. Candy bars are broken in pieces and handed out. An American pastor stands at the altar beside a German counterpart in a white robe. Bandy finds a place in the last pew near the door. He’s glad of the cane when he folds to sit.

The service takes place in both tongues. Throughout the service some silent signal tells the gathering to kneel and then return to their seats. Bandy can’t do it and stays in the pew. When the times come to stand, he finds the cane a lifesaver. He can’t take pictures in here. He grows bored.

The private next to him seems particularly hard-praying. During a German part of the service when the boy is taking a break, Bandy taps him on the leg and whispers.

“Son?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Mind if I ask you what you’re praying so hard for?”

The soldier is not troubled by the query. Bandy sees gentleness on his young face. He wonders what other expressions have rent these smooth features, what rage and killing-passion, shattering panic, doubt?

“No, sir,” the soldier whispers in return. “I don’t mind.”

Bandy waits. The boy looks into his own lap, as though to repeat his prayer out loud requires the same bowed head.

“I was askin’ God for two things.”

“Uh-huh.”

“First, I want Him to let me git home all in one piece. I figure everybody’s askin’ for that one.”

Bandy nods at this and senses the bandage around his right leg. He concurs, a good request. -

“And two, I wish for God to bring this country down to its knees so bad they never try to make war again.”

The boy seems ashamed to have asked this. He does not lift his eyes to Bandy’s. But Bandy understands. From the mouth of this young soldier has come the wish that’s been shared by every fighting man across history, in the aeons before history: May the war he is fighting be the last one. May the sacrifices of his comrades be for a purpose, and the destruction be enough to make men turn away forever from warfare.

The soldier is ashamed because he doesn’t pray for peace, for everyone to join hands and forgive and fashion a new day. That would be a better, more Christian and charitable prayer. But this American boy has seen too much and realizes too much to believe that even beseeching God for peace will make it happen in this world of men. So he asks instead for the right thing, the brave thing, the prayer that will most likely work: that God be sufficiently vengeful and desolating to make us stop ourselves.

This soldier, Bandy thinks, knows the truth. What he doesn’t know is history. There’s never been a final war.

Bandy thanks the GI with one more finger’s touch on his leg. The soldier returns to his private dialogue with heaven. Bandy takes up the cane and leaves the church.

In the street in front of the church, the Eighty-third Infantry of the Ninth Army readies itself to surge forward. Bandy was moved by the boy’s sad and sage prayer, but now he lets out a fresh laugh at the Eighty-third.

A vast collection of vehicles stretches from the central square out past the town limits. Though the Eighty-third is an infantry division, they’ve gone mobile through another clever tactic. In every German town, whether surrendered or fought for, the division commandeers a quota of vehicles. The Eighty-third’s Major General Macon has given the order: “Anything that moves, no questions asked.” The men dress up the vehicles with a fast coat of olive drab paint and slap on a white U.S. Army star. Then the ten thousand-plus soldiers climb on board and off they go in a startling convoy of captured
Wehrmacht
jeeps and Mark V or Tiger tanks, civilian and staff cars, motorbikes, buses, and two fire trucks. One of the fire trucks leads the motley parade, displaying behind it a large banner reading:
next stop: berlin.

Bandy has cast his lot with this inventive, hell-bent-for-leather bunch. Formerly it was called the “Thunderbolt” Division; American correspondents have renamed it the “Rag-Tag Circus.”

Like the Eighty-third, the weight of the Ninth Army has set its sights on the final prize of the war, the German capital. The Ninth’s commanding officer, General Simpson, has issued instructions that he wants an armored division and an infantry division set up on the
Autobahn
above Magdeburg on the Elbe River as fast as possible. From there, he wants to move on Potsdam, “where we’ll be ready to close in on Berlin.” Every division in the Ninth that isn’t involved in reducing the surrounded German force in the Ruhr pocket has laid its plans for heading to Berlin. The Second “Hell on Wheels” Armored Division is moving pace for pace on the Rag-Tag Circus’s left flank. The Second is so ponderous a force that reporters say it takes half a day to move past a given point at two miles per hour.

Elsewhere along the Ninth Army’s fifty-mile-wide front, just slightly behind the Second and Eighty-third, course the legions and weapons of the Fifth Armored “Victory” Division, plus the Thirtieth, Eighty-fourth, and Hundred and second Infantry Divisions. Taken together they form an inexorable thrust plunging east across the German interior.

Bandy looks over his chosen Eighty-third. He’s saddled them up and races them to Berlin against all the others, a jockey on a crowded track. Right now the Rag-Tag Circus is in a tight heat, a close second to the Hell on Wheels boys.

Holzminden has offered up two tractors with attached hay wagons, two more buses, a motorcycle with sidecar, and a dump truck. Out in front the fire truck sounds its siren. To Bandy the thing looks hilarious painted green, it still bristles with ladders and hoses. At the loud blast the last soldiers file out of the church and surrounding buildings. For the ninety minutes they’ve been in Holzminden making sure the town is secure and gathering up all weapons, the Eighty-third has about doubled the town’s population. Bandy waits for the captain to come out, and waves to him. He asks the officer if he might have the space in the motorcycle sidecar. It will give him 360 degrees of open air to shoot his photos. And no one will jostle his tender shoulder or leg. The captain cheerfully agrees and finds a driver for the bike. Bandy climbs into the sidecar with delicate motions. The driver, a corporal, locates two pairs of goggles in the sidecar’s luggage boot. He and Bandy slip them on over their helmets. The young man enjoys revving the bike’s engine. He grins and shouts to Bandy that he’s in ecstasy. He says he’s from Jersey.