The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (49 page)

When all the GIs are mounted, the fire truck begins the parade. The hundreds of trucks, cars, motorbikes, and tractors of the Rag-Tag Circus lurch out of Holzminden issuing every kind of mechanized sound, spits and backfires, a clanging bell, diesel coughs, and the hums of many Mercedes engines. Bandy and his Jersey driver wait for several minutes before they begin to pull forward. Citizens line the road and stand on balconies. Their send-off is divided about in thirds, Bandy observes. Some folks smile and wave goodbye, some grimace, some are stunned.

Bevern is only five miles off. By the time the lead vehicles of the Eighty-third reach the village outskirts, the last soldiers will have just rolled out of Holzminden. Bandy and his driver are in the second half of the convoy, about three miles behind the wind-rippling sign on the tail of the lead fire truck. The road is a tarmac and gravel two-lane strip through easy hills and unfilled farmland. Wooded patches worry Bandy, especially near bends in the road. Bandy won’t even hear gunfire over the roar of the motorbike. But the Eighty-third’s fleet takes up both sides of the road and fills the horizon fore and aft. An ambush would be suicide. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It has happened. The size of the division simply placates Bandy’s worry; there are many other targets besides him.

The plan for the day—so long as the connect-the-burgomaster game keeps working—is to follow this road through three more villages and bivouac for the night in the town of Alfeld. Tomorrow the objective is to enter the city of Braunschweig. At this rate, without any serious scrapes with the enemy, the Eighty-third should have a good shot at being the first division to reach Magdeburg on the Elbe, the staging ground for the final push to Berlin. There, the Rag-Tag Circus will leave the back roads and hit the highway, Hitler’s
Autobahn.

Bandy loads a fresh roll into the Leica, no small feat with one good hand and a rattling lap. His instincts tell him to stay ready, everything has gone too nicely the past few days.

The moment he snaps closed the camera back, his Jersey bike driver dodges in a quick shift to the left, rocking Bandy in the sidecar. Bandy grits his teeth at the shear of pain from his stitches, right through his groin, it hurts so much he has to hold his bladder. He curses the driver, knowing the kid won’t hear him. The soldier pivots in his bike seat and waves forward a long black Mercedes. The car pulls alongside, scooting fast between Bandy’s bike and a farm truck loaded with GIs beside them in the other lane. The Mercedes is a German staff car, flying twin swastika banners from the front bumpers. Bandy thinks the car must have been requisitioned at the last moment in Holzminden and there was no time to paint it green and yank off those flags. But the man driving the big car wears a chauffeur’s cap, black gloves, and a fretful look. In the rear seat, a well-dressed civilian careens from window to window gawping at the American column on both sides of him.

The chauffeur leans on the horn and weaves through traffic. Each vehicle in turn pulls aside and lets the Mercedes through, each American soldier stares in amazement at the lost German staff car. Bandy shakes his head; apparently the Eighty-third has captured so many German vehicles that this misbegotten staff car mistook the Rag-Tag Circus for a
Wehrmacht
column. Bandy starts taking pictures. There is too little real comedy in war.

A burst of machine gun fire brings the Mercedes to a halt. The convoy slows around it. A jeep escorts the car to the shoulder of the road. Passing, Bandy recognizes the German-speaking captain, pointing his pistol again, smiling again. The Mercedes will be painted green in about five minutes, and those Nazi flags will be tucked in some soldier’s backpack.

The procession moves east at less than ten miles per hour. The Jersey driver keeps heaving the rpm’s on the motorbike, wanting to peel out of the pack and go touring with Bandy locked at his hip. Bandy doesn’t know the driver’s name, and takes his picture as an anonymous Italian boy fighting overseas. He’s got a great face, Bandy thinks, swarthy and all lit up, American as apple pie because he looks so European.

The road ahead is straight and unobstructed, and green vehicles packed with soldiers fill every inch of it. Riding in the open sidecar like this, Bandy senses the power of the Allied advance. Beyond the fields and heights on all sides of him there are other American and British divisions on the offensive, knifing into central Germany, every minute taking more miles of enemy land under occupation. Bandy wonders, Why do the Germans resist? Why do they make us wreck their towns, why do they blow their own bridges, why do they sacrifice themselves? Bandy wants to ride the Rag-Tag Circus all the way into Berlin and nab that sick fuck Hitler, get the Kraut-speaking captain and his .45 Colt and ask these and a few other questions.

The column proceeds unimpeded. This is a good sign. If Bevern had plans to resist, the shooting would start around now, with the green fire truck in the lead nearing the village outskirts. Another burgomaster has seen the common sense of surrender.

So have a small group of
Wehrmacht
regulars standing beside the road. Ten German soldiers in a line on the left-hand shoulder have their hands in the air and rifles at their feet. Every olive drab truck, tractor, car, tank, motorbike—Bandy snaps the men’s picture in his turn—bus and jeep sliding past thumbs them to the rear, telling these quitted enemies to keep walking west and give up back there, we’ve got no time to stop, read the sign, pal,
BERLIN.

After twenty minutes on the two-lane road, the first cluster of dwellings appears. These are small farmhouses with roofs of red clay tile or thatch. Those barns left standing appear ancient, weathered to a lovely woody gray, pleasing to Bandy’s farmer’s eye. Other outbuildings are scorched to the ground, just ridges of charcoal in the dirt like the spines of long-dead giant beasts. The Jersey boy slows the motorbike. A canopy of bare branches over the road marks the outer boundary of the village. f

The convoy comes to a stop a quarter mile out. The driver rolls the throttle under his hand in impatience. He looks down at Bandy. He gets a nod.

The motorbike leaps out of formation and takes the shoulder of the road. Horns honk at them bouncing past. Bandy hears the objections through his own low grunts as the sidecar jars his sutures.

The Jersey driver twists the bike however he must through the parked vehicles to get Bandy into the village. In a minute they are in the center.

The motorbike is shut down. The Circus’s green fire truck has stopped in the square, behind it a hundred vehicles bunch up. No soldier has dismounted. No citizens are out to greet the Americans. The idling of the many motors sounds like an ill wind.

All around the square, white sheets hang over the banisters of verandas, out of second-story windows, they are draped across electric lines. The laundry and the iced silence give the hamlet a cool, snowy guise.

Bandy steps out of the sidecar. The Italian boy lifts his goggles but does not follow.

On both sides of the main street, outside a bakery, a lawyer’s office, a sweets shop, a leather tanner, are strung up bodies. There are twelve of them. They’ve been hung from lampposts and high iron railings. Five elderly men and five women. Two boys.

Around their necks, lapped over the nooses, are signs scrawled in a thick black hand:
vaterlandverhãtor.

Traitor to the Fatherland.

Bandy stands in the middle of the empty street. Since he has walked forward, he hears at his back several coming bootsteps of soldiers and officers. The Americans will cut down these civilians, lay them out, and step back to let the townspeople cover them.

This is the work of retreating SS men. They will not allow surrender.

With the street filling now, the citizens of Bevern materialize in their doorways and on stoops. Bandy leans on his cane and walks forward through these decorations of the occasion of war, among the dangling bodies, among the sheets of surrender, and now the running women who drop and wail below the swinging feet of innocent loved ones.

The last body at the end of the street hangs from a flagpole. Bandy guesses the building behind the pole is the town hall. The corpse is dressed in a suit and shiny black shoes. A velvet sash stripes the chest. This was the burgomaster.

While Bandy stares, an old woman shuffles past him. She does not touch the rope that has killed the old man. She stands for a moment looking up at his heels as she might were he a flag. The woman contemplates something, what? That he was an old fool? That he should have stayed hidden and quiet like the rest of them who survived in Bevern?

She lowers her head. Below the bright black shoes, she folds to the ground. The woman lifts her open palms to her face like washing from a stream, and sobs into them.

Bandy takes her picture, the body hovering over her head. He thinks of a prayer he heard that Easter morning and composes a caption:

“Germany, brought to its knees.”

~ * ~

April 1, 1945, 7:20
p.m.

Grolman Strasse

Charlottenburg, Berlin

lottie grips the long knife carefully. she has it by the hilt,
backward, laying the blade along the meat of her forearm.

She hurries behind her mother. Freya skitters close to the charred facades of the buildings, donning their darkness. Both she and Lottie are cloaked head to toe in black dresses with black shawls over their heads and shoulders. Freya’s wrap flutters around her striding form, she is a raven, like Lottie, ebon with the night and the sagging wreckage.

The knives stay hidden beneath the shawls. Freya spent an hour running the blades against a kitchen steel to bring out their sharpest edge. Once the foot of night was fully down over Berlin, she led her daughter out of the house.

Lottie has to walk fast to keep up. She is afraid of the cool blade in her hand, scared too of being out after dark against the law. Goebbels has issued another proclamation, to keep night looters from wandering the city. So far mother and daughter move unseen; no cars or trucks navigate the road, there’s no more gasoline in Berlin. What fuel there is gets reserved by the Party bosses and their families, funneled into their cushy cars and headed south out of Berlin to the mountains, or secretly west to throw up their hands in front of the
Amis.

Mutti is obsessed, Lottie thinks. To be doing this, with knives and breaking the law and dragging me along to help. But the Jew must eat.

So must Lottie. Her hunger of late has shed pounds off her already slim frame. In the mirror her eyes have taken on the scooped look of birds’ nests. Her golden hair has gone brittle and her stamina, especially on the cello, is shriveling. There would be just enough food for mother and daughter without the Jew. But they are not without him. So Lottie has learned the trick of heading to bombed areas as soon as the all-clear sirens quit to snatch up emergency ration cards and a bowl of soup. Freya has become a marvel at securing black-market victuals, even without money or anything to barter. Lottie no longer leaves the house when Mutti takes the meager meals down the basement steps to Julius. She stays in the living room or in her bed. She has stopped playing the Galiano in the house. She saves her strength for the BPO concerts, which have gone unabated, three and four days a week. There’s been no talk among the musicians of the plot to escape, not even a rumor. Lottie is concerned that the plan may not have blossomed to a reality. But if there is a plot, it can’t be spoken of. She will have to wait and see and worry.

At home there is no thought of making the Jew leave. There is no more talk of suicide. Those issues are long settled. Sometime in the next few weeks, Lottie will go from Berlin with the orchestra. Until then she has resolved herself to helping Mutti find food because if she does not, she fears her mother will feed the Jew and her daughter and let herself starve.

Freya halts at the corner of Savigny Platz. Lottie moves beside her, still hugging the wall of the last building. In peacetime this little park is a green and pastel gem, brimming with umbrellas, tables, and vendors. All that is gone. Tonight there’s nothing in the plaza but a dead horse and children playing.

Three days ago the skies changed over Berlin. In the mornings, the Americans continue to arrive on time with their B-17s. At night—perhaps even tonight in another hour or so—the British and their Mosquito bombers return. The afternoons have always been calm, at least in those parts of town not on fire. But three days ago the Russians claimed the high sun as their own. They punish Berlin not with whistling bombs but with screaming, low-flying fighters, blasting wing-mounted machine guns onto streets and squares. There are no warnings before the Soviets whiz overhead, they come so fast and low, and from such a short distance away, that radar doesn’t catch them soon enough in advance. Berlin’s antiaircraft batteries must fire almost level with the ground to reach the fighters, spraying almost as many bullets on the city as the Reds. Lottie has seen the pilots in their cockpits, red stars painted on tails and wings, the ground ripping beneath them. After four years of bombings, this new and sudden plague rising from the east is hardest for Berliners to bear. These are the first armed Russians in the city.