Another Green World (10 page)

For how, pray tell, could this lunatic group succeed where such responsible bodies as the American Jewish Committee, touting more moderate and sensible ideas (Mr. Roosevelt could give a
speech
, couldn't he?), had been courteously but definitively rebuffed? (No, sorry, he cannot.) The complete response of the American government to date had been the creation of the War Refugee Board, a savvy executive conjuration that, in one stroke, mollified Henry Morgenthau and got that hothead, Martina What's-her-name, safely out of the White House to someplace Eleanor couldn't find her.

Yet behold what the gods have wrought. Here stands Harvey Grabsteen,
the soul of disrepute, yelling at a colored chicken farmer, who sensibly ignores him, while a film star with both money and time to burn dangles a wrist in the face of a Great War noncom roughly the size of a Brahma bull, and Ari Glasser, noted Hollywood impresario, purrs Schiller into the ear of a humble barkeep from the sheltered lanes of Brookland who, in blatant disregard of Aristotle's law of
probabilitas
, has somehow become the star of the show.

Happen? Is it really going to happen? Dear Lord, please, I beg you, show me how to stop it.

In late September the weather turned cooler and very dry. By the third week of October the fallen leaves, dry as parchment, presented a serious danger to the three dozen extras who were poised to launch yet another humiliating mission in their make-believe war. You couldn't move without setting off a racket, and the trainees, so-called, had some moving to do.

Realism, they called this. The objective was a low ridge maybe three hundred meters ahead. You could make it out as a row of dark pines against the gray sky. The problems here were (a) you had to get there quickly and (b) undetected, despite certain complications known to include, but perhaps not limited to, (c) hounds and (d) machine guns. The machine guns might not be loaded, though the NCOs claimed otherwise; Ingo wouldn't know about that. But he didn't guess you could unload a hound dog. Vernon claimed they'd been trained by his Uncle Leon to detect white people by their scent.

“I guess that makes Jews safe,” quipped a little guy named Stu—a dentist, hence
ex officio
the Varian Fry Brigade's medical officer. Being a dentist did not make him by any stretch the most unlikely or ill-suited trainee in D Squad, which was a dumping ground for the aged, the slow, the timid and the maladroit—in short, for those would-be guerrillas deemed least likely to survive by the troika of Great War sergeants running the show. The fitter candidates—though even here you were speaking in relative terms—had been divvied up like sandlot ball teams between squads A and

B. There was no C. Evidently the higher-class letters wanted a bit of space between themselves and these uncouth combatants. To make things worse, in radio chatter, for the sake of unambiguous communication A became “Alpha” and B “Bravo,” whereas the lowly D could do no better than “Dog.” It was like living on the wrong side of the tracks; after a while, Ingo found, you began to acquire a sort of outlaw pride.

The three veterans of the last war were known among the lower ranks
as Three Guys Named Moe and, insofar as possible, avoided. Ingo guessed this wouldn't be so easy in Slovakia.

If only, he thought, I had a snowball's chance of washing out.

But that was unthinkable: Ingo was in for the whole nine yards. No matter how badly he screwed up, the Moes only rode him harder.

“Get down there,” growled the largest and toughest of the three, designated One Moe or, in honor of the rifle, M-1. (The man's real name, Ingo happened to know, was Vincent Bloom.) “I'm gonna be timing you. When I say go, you haul your ashes out of here—you've got about forty-five seconds till the shitstorm commences.”

Stu, crouching next to Ingo in the shallow trench, gave a moan he might have picked up from his patients back in St. Louis. Ingo didn't think it was worth the trouble. Go ahead, he thought. Loose the damned dogs of war. Get it over with.

“Go!” barked M-1, staring with malevolent voracity at a battle-scarred Timex.

Ingo scrabbled forward, his weapon—a Schmeisser MP-40, like a shorter and uglier tommy gun—cradled between his forearms, as far from his face as he could get it. His elbows and knees banged the gritty, rust-colored dirt of southern Maryland. Leaves crackled around him as the rest of the squad kicked off. The racket must have been audible clear across the empty ground ahead, a half-drained marsh filled with cattails and sword-leaf sedge, interspersed with alder and islandlike clumps of river birch, whose bare limbs and peeling copper bark made them look plague-stricken. This godforsaken place was said to resemble the countryside of Lower Silesia. Ingo, who had been to Silesia, remembered it differently.

Off to the right, not far away, came the baying of bloodhounds.

“This is kinda like Boy Scouts,” muttered Stu behind him, sardonically. “Only ten times worse.”

As with all Stu's banal comments, Ingo found this both annoying and welcome, as it provided some distraction from the misery at hand.

“Were you ever a Boy Scout?” Stu was scuttling like a crab, trying to overtake Ingo, who could move pretty fast when he was scared enough.

“Shh,” Ingo hissed. “Yes, I was.”

That was more or less the truth—though Ingo's memory of scouting was probably so far from Stu's as to represent a wholly different experience. To his own way of thinking he had never been a Boy Scout, not really, even though he'd spent much of his youth hiking and camping and learning survival tricks cheek-by-jowl with those who were. Wearing the same olive-drab shorts, the same red-and-yellow bandanna. It had marked,
he supposed, the start of his long, undistinguished career as an impersonator. Culminating in his present role: a German-American barkeep pretending to be a Jewish partisan, frightened of his own weapon, wallowing through Chesapeake bottomland, hunted by white-hating hounds. Point man of Dog Squad. Having no end of fun.

Afterward, as always, they gathered for an ordeal formally known as the Post-Operation Brief, more familiarly as a chalk talk. These sessions took place in a shed originally built to house farm machinery, with no heat and little shelter from the autumn wind. Two of the Moes were present, along with all twelve members of D Squad and someone Ingo had never seen before—a morose-looking man, somewhere in his forties, with a week's worth of gray and black stubble. His chambray work clothes didn't look right on him. He had been accorded the honor of a wooden packing crate to sit on, while the Moes stood on either side of a dusty slateboard and the trainees hunched dirty and tired on the packed earthen floor of the barn.

The scrawnier of the Moes—Eat Moe they called him, from the Louis Jordan song—began with a general review of the “tactical situation” and ended with a summary verdict on the squad's performance: You guys would be Ralston's Doberman Chow by this time. He then settled into a meticulous accounting of how the assignment ought to have been carried out, noting point by point, with reference to unreadable chalk diagrams, how the squad's actions had strayed from the recommended course. Now and then he would point to a trainee and announce, “Right there, the Krauts woulda been on you like a cheap suit,” or “Congratulations—you just won a free ride in a cattle car.”

Through all of this, the morose visitor sat seemingly indifferent. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, and cast a single long, slow glance around the room, lingering nowhere, as though nothing he saw was worth a second look.

Eventually Eat Moe ran out of bad things to say. He singled out a couple of trainees for qualified praise, then made an exaggerated shrug. “The rest of you guys, what can I tell ya? We'll be posting the final roster in the next couple days. I hope you ain't got your hearts set on an expenses-paid holiday in the Old Country.”

Now a shuffle, as the squad sensed the end of another chalk talk. But One Moe stepped forward and growled in his no-BS voice, “Hold your water, gentlemen. There's somebody here you want to meet.”

The gloomy-looking man showed no more interest than before. He shifted wearily on the packing crate as the big man went on:

“We've been joined today by Captain Aristotle. The captain has come all the way from Hungary, enemy-occupied territory, to give us the benefit of his expertise as we prepare for this mission. I know you'll all be interested in what he has to say.”

The man rose slowly to his feet. Ingo found both name and rank implausible: the man looked less like a soldier than a weary grocer—not even the owner of the store, maybe the guy who comes in after hours to stock the shelves—and scarcely called to mind the philosopher, except maybe by his bone-weary
gravitas.
But then he began to speak, in a voice that did not match his body or any other, a voice so ancient and hollow it might have risen from a crypt, and somehow you could not keep from listening.

“The Germans know they have lost this war.” His English was clear, accented just enough to lend him an air of worldly sophistication. “They have lost the conquered lands, their source of strategic materials. Their power is spent, their soldiers are too old or too young and are fighting without enough bullets, their tanks are running out of petrol, their General Staff is discredited, the Gestapo is hanging people from lampposts. In the battlefield, they have reverted to the tactics of the Great War. They are dying in place, all across the front. Russian spearheads have penetrated German territory, and the Western allies are nearing the Rhine.”

Weltschmerz, thought Ingo. World-pain: one of those mental states for which only Germans have a name. And this poor Joe has got a bad case of it.

“There can be no clearer signal that the war is lost, and that the army knows the war is lost, than the attempt on Hitler's life three months ago. While they were winning, the gentlemen of the Wehrmacht, the von Thises and von Thats from the old aristocratic families, were happy to avert their eyes while the bullyboys stomped all over the continent, looting and murdering and swaggering like drunken oafs. Now the generals have experienced a remarkable change of heart. They have observed that the war cannot be won. And suddenly their eyes are open to the crimes of the state they serve. This government must be replaced, they have decided, with one that can make peace, a government with whom the Western powers will deign to negotiate. A government led by decent, civilized men. Indeed, consisting of men very like themselves. So let us get rid of this vulgar little Austrian and put an end to this silly quarrel before anything really unpleasant happens—such as a Bolshevik horde overrunning all the great capitals of Middle Europe.

“But you see, here the generals have made an error, these men from the choicest bloodlines. They believe the war is over simply because the outcome is no longer in doubt. In the great game of war, as these men learned it reading Clausewitz at Lichterfelde, in a room overlooking the parade ground, one does not carry things past the point of futility. One shoves the little pewter flag-holders about the map, until such time as the result is determined. Then one shakes hands ‘round the table and goes upstairs to change for the
Abendessen.
That is how war is fought, or so the members of the General Staff like to think.”

Aristotle paused—not for breath, Ingo thought. Rather to give his audience time to absorb what he was telling them. No grocer's stockboy, this one. More like a professor of history. Or a shabby aristocrat who reads history for pleasure, alone in his book-lined study, a poor Hungarian relation of those same Wehrmacht generals he's talking about.

“But this war has never been like that. It has never been the kind of war fought across a map table. Yes, there have been classic encirclements, stolen marches, cavalry charges and the rest of the Lichterfelde repertoire. But this war has never been a struggle for territory, never a duel of opposing field commanders. This is a Hassenkrieg, a war of hatred, and it belongs to a much more venerable tradition—the history of tribal enmity, Huns against the Visigoths, Saxons against the Gauls, each side seeking nothing less than the total destruction of the other. Militarily, one cannot understand this war by studying the campaigns of Bismarck or Napoleon, as they like to do at General Staff College. No, one needs to look back to Frederick Barbarossa, the era of the Crusades, when the struggle was not truly won until the last infidel had been slain, and his family with him, and the village he was born in razed, and his cattle slaughtered, his fields laid waste, the scrolls of his heretic creed thrown into the flames and his head stuck on a pike as a warning to others. And only then, when from every tree waves the cross—the holy cross or the hooked cross, take your pick— only then can victory be declared.”

Aristotle turned his head, as though he heard something, a call from on high. “But by the same token, defeat cannot be acknowledged either. The True Faith is not dead as long as a single believer still holds the sacred banner aloft. The struggle must continue. Perhaps there is time to slay an infidel or two. A few heathen screeds might yet be stuffed into the mouths of heretics. There may be fields left to burn, or children to dismember in front of their parents. If so, to carry on the fight is a sacred obligation.”

He gave them a slow nod. “Yes: this is the nature of the Hate War. It is hard reality, and at the same time something out of old German myth.

The dark romance of the cross-bearers, the Teutonic Knights. I feel it is important that you understand this, even if the gentlemen of the Wehrmacht do not, or pretend not to. Because you will not be fighting the Wehrmacht if you go over there. The Wehrmacht is busy with the Russians. No, you will be fighting the holy warriors themselves—the SS, the blood-sworn defenders of the faith. Bearers of the hooked cross, which they call the swastika. I have been fighting these men for many years now, and have learned a thing or two about them. Perhaps I can teach you something, those of you who still wish to go. Or perhaps you will decide not to go after all, once you hear what I have to say.”

Behind Ingo, Stu shifted noisily, his ammo bandoliers clanking against the entrenching tool on his back. “This guy's a million laughs,” he muttered. To Ingo, it sounded like a cry of despair.