Armageddon In Retrospect (11 page)

I
f, on Judgment Day, God were to ask Paul which of the two should rightly be his eternal residence, Heaven or Hell, Paul would likely suggest that, by his own and by Cosmic standards, Hell was his destiny—recalling the wretched thing he had done. The Almighty, in all His Wisdom, might recognize that Paul’s life on the whole had been a harmless one, and that his tender conscience had already tortured him mightily—for the thing he did.

Paul’s garish adventures as a prisoner of war in Sudetenland lost their troubling forms as they mired down in the past, but one dismal image would not sink from his consciousness. His wife’s playful banter at dinner one night served to recall what he longed to forget. Sue had spent the afternoon with Mrs. Ward, next door, and Mrs. Ward had shown her an exquisite silver service for twenty-four, which, Sue was astonished to learn, Mr. Ward had liberated and brought home from the war in Europe.

“Honey,” Sue chided him, “couldn’t you have brought home just a little something better than you did?”

It was not likely that the Germans bewailed Paul’s plundering, for one rusty and badly bent Luftwaffe saber was the whole of his loot. His companions in the Russian Zone, under post-war anarchy, Free Enterprise
par excellence
that lasted for weeks, came home laden with treasure like Spanish galleons, while Paul was content with his foolish relic. Though he had weeks to seek and take what he would, his first hours as a swashbuckling conqueror were his last. The thing that broke his spirit and his hate, the image that tormented him, began taking shape on a glorious morning of Spring in the mountains, May 8, 1945.

It took Paul and his fellow prisoners of war in Hellendorf, Sudetenland, some time to get used to the absence of their guards, who had prudently taken to the forests and hilltops the night before. He and two other Americans wandered uncertainly down the teeming road toward Peterswald, another tranquil farming village of five hundred war-bewildered souls. Humanity moved in wailing rivers, flowing in both directions with a unanimous lament—“The Russians are coming!” After four tedious kilometers in this milieu, the three settled on the bank of a stream that cut through Peterswald, wondering how they might reach the American lines, wondering if the Russians were killing everyone in their path as some said. Near them, secure in a barn-sheltered hutch, a white rabbit sat in darkness, listening to the uncustomary din without.

The trio felt no part of the terror that surged through the village, no pity. “God knows the arrogant block-heads have been begging for it,” said Paul, and the others nodded in grim amusement. “After what the Germans did to them, you can’t blame the Russians, no matter what they do,” said Paul; and again his companions nodded. They sat in silence and watched as frantic mothers hid with their young in cellars, as others scurried up the hillside and into the woods, or deserted their homes to flee down the road with a few precious parcels.

A wide-eyed, long-striding British lance corporal shouted from the road, “Better get a move on, lads; they’re in Hellendorf right now!”

A cloud of dust in the west, the roar of trucks, the scattering of frightened refugees, and the Russians entered the village, pitching cigarettes to the astonished citizens, and giving wet, enthusiastic kisses to all who dared show themselves. Paul cavorted about their trucks, laughing and shouting, and catching the loaves and chunks of meat thrown to him by those liberators who heard his “American! American!” above the wild accordion music that streamed from the red-starred trucks. Happy and excited, he and his friends returned to the brookside with armloads of food, and at once began to stuff themselves.

But as they ate, the others—Czechs, Poles, Jugoslavs, Russians, a fearsome horde of outraged German slaves—came to smash and loot and burn for the merry hell of it, in the wake of the Russian Army. Systematically, in purposeful knots of three and four, they went from house to house, breaking down doors, threatening the occupants, and taking what pleased them. Overlooking plunder was not likely, for Peterswald was built in a narrow draw, only one house deep on either side of a single road. Paul thought that thousands must have explored every house from cellar to attic before the moonlit evening came.

He and his friends watched the earnest pillagers at work, giving them sickly smiles whenever a group passed by. An exultant pair of Scotchmen had made friends with such a group, and, while on a cheerful foray, stopped off to talk with the Americans. Each had a handsome bicycle, numerous rings and watches, field glasses, cameras, and other admirable trinkets.

“After all,” one of them explained, “you don’t want to be sittin’ down on a day like this, you’ll never get another chance like this one. You’re the victors, you know, you’ve a bloody good right to anything you like.”

The three Americans talked it up among themselves, Paul at the fore, and convinced each other that they would be completely justified in looting the homes of the enemy. The three together beset the nearest house, one which had been vacant since before their arrival in Peterswald. It had already been well-exploited; no glass remained in the windows; every drawer had been dumped, every garment torn from the closets; cupboards had been stripped bare, and pillows and mattresses had been disemboweled by searchers. Each of the marauders before Paul and his friends had examined the heaps discarded by his predecessor until nothing but shreds of cloth and a few pots remained.

It was nearly evening when they picked over the sorry lot, and they found nothing to interest them. Paul remarked that there probably was not much in the house to begin with; whoever had lived there had been poor. The furnishings were shabby, the walls peeling, and the outside in need of painting and repair. But when Paul climbed the stairway to the tiny upper floor, he found an amazing room that did not fit into the impoverished pattern. It was a bedroom decorated in gay colors, with beautifully carved furniture, fairyland pictures on candy-striped walls, and freshly painted woodwork. Discarded loot, a forlorn hillock of toys stood in the middle of the floor. The only undisturbed objects in the whole house, leaning against the wall near the head of the bed, were a pair of, “I’ll be damned; look, kids’ crutches.”

The Americans, having found nothing of value, agreed that it was getting too late for treasure hunting that day, and proposed that they set about getting supper. They had a good quantity of food on hand that the Russians had given to them, but got the idea that supper on this day of days should certainly be something special, with chicken, milk, and eggs, and maybe even a rabbit. Seeking such delicacies, the trio broke up to scour the neighboring barns and farmyards.

Paul peered into the small barn behind the house which they had hoped to plunder. Whatever food or livestock may have been here had been carted east hours ago, he reflected. On the dirt floor near the doorway were a few potatoes which he picked up, but nothing else. As he stuffed the potatoes into his pockets and prepared to move on, he heard a slight rustling from one corner. The gentle noise was repeated. When his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he could see a rabbit hutch in which a fat, white rabbit sat, twinkling his pink nose and breathing quickly. This was sensational luck, the
pièce de résistance
for the banquet. Paul opened the door and removed the unprotesting animal, holding it by its ears. Never having killed a rabbit with his hands, he was dubious as to how he might do it. At last he laid the rabbit’s head on a chopping block and smashed its skull with the back of an axe. It kicked feebly for a few seconds and died.

Delighted with himself, Paul set about skinning and cleaning the rabbit, cutting off a foot for good luck in surely better days to come. Finished, he stood in the barn doorway, contemplating peace, the sunset, and the stream of sheepish German soldiers shuffling home from the last pocket of resistance. With them were the weary civilians who had fled down the road that morning, only to be turned back by the Russian advance.

Suddenly Paul was aware of three figures who detached themselves from the dismal procession and moved toward him. They paused before the battered house. A wave of remorse and sorrow billowed in Paul’s chest: “This must be their little house and barn,” he thought. “This must belong to that old man and woman, and to that crippled boy.” The woman wept and the man shook his head. The boy kept trying to get their attention, saying something and gesturing toward the barn. Paul stood in the shadows so they could not see him, and he ran away with the rabbit when they went into the house.

He brought his contribution to the place that the others had chosen for a fireplace, a knoll from which Paul could see the barn he had left through a gap in a poplar windbreak. The rabbit was placed with the rest of the booty on a cloth stretched over the ground.

As the others busied themselves with preparing the food, he watched the barn, for the little boy had come out of his house, and was moving toward the barn as swiftly as his crutches would carry him. He disappeared into the barn for an agonizing long time. Paul heard his faint shriek, and saw him come to the door, carrying the soft white pelt with him. He rubbed it against his cheek, and then sank to the doorsill to bury his face in the fur and sob his heart out.

Paul looked away, and did not look again. The other two did not see the child, and Paul did not tell them about him. When the three sat down to supper, one boy began grace: “Our Father, we thank thee for this food thou hast set before us…”

Heading for the American lines, moving casually from one village to the next, Paul’s companions accumulated a sizeable quantity of German treasure. For some reason, all that Paul brought home was one rusty and badly bent Luftwaffe saber.

I.

T
his story is about soldiers, but it isn’t exactly a war story. The war was over when it all happened, so I guess that makes it a murder story. No mystery, just murder.

My name is Sam Kleinhans. It’s a German name, and, I’m sorry to say, my father was mixed up in the
German-American Bund
in New Jersey for a while before the war. When he found out what it was all about, he got out in a hurry. But a lot of the people in our neighborhood went for the
Bund
in a big way. A couple of families on our street, I remember, got so excited about what Hitler was doing in the Fatherland, they sold everything they had, and went back to Germany to live.

Some of their kids were just about my age, and, when the U.S. got into the war and I went overseas as a rifleman, I wondered if I might not wind up shooting at some of my old playmates. I don’t think I did. I found out afterwards that most of the
Bund
kids who took out German citizenship wound up as riflemen on the Russian front. A few got into small-time intelligence work, trying to mix in with American troops without being noticed, but not many. The Germans didn’t trust them worth a damn—or at least that’s what one of our former neighbors told Father in a letter asking him for a CARE parcel. The same man said he’d do anything to get back to the States, and I imagine they all feel that way.

Being so close to them and the
Bund
monkey business made me pretty self-conscious about my German ancestry when we finally got into the war. I must have seemed like quite a jerk to a lot of the guys, sounding off the way I did about loyalty, fighting for a cause, and all that. Not that the other guys in the Army didn’t believe in those things—it’s just that it wasn’t fashionable to talk about them. Not in World War II.

Thinking back on it, I
know
I was corny. I remember what I said on the morning of May eighth, for instance, the day the war with Germany ended. “Isn’t it glorious!” I said.

“Ain’t what glorious?” said Private George Fisher, raising one eyebrow, as though he’d said something pretty deep. He was scratching his back on a strand of barbed-wire, thinking about something else, I guess. Food and cigarettes, probably, and maybe even women.

It wasn’t very smart to be seen talking with George anymore. He didn’t have any friends left in camp, and anybody who tried to be buddies with him was likely to wind up in the same lonely spot. All of us were milling around, and George and I just happened—I thought then—to come together there by the gate.

The Germans had made him head American in our prison camp. They said it was because he could speak German. At any rate, he made a good thing out of it. He was a lot fatter than the rest of us—so he probably was thinking about women. Nobody else had mentioned the subject since about a month after we’d been captured. Everybody but George had been living on potatoes for eight months, so, like I said, the subject of women was about as popular as the subject of raising orchids or playing the zither.

The way I felt then, if Betty Grable had showed up and said she was all mine, I would have told her to make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Only it wasn’t Betty that was on her way to see George and me that day—it was the Russian Army. The two of us, standing on the road shoulder in front of the prison gate, were listening to the tanks whining in the valley, just starting to climb up to where we were.

The big guns to the north, that had been rattling the prison windowpanes for a week, were quiet now, and our guards had disappeared during the night. Before that, the only traffic on the road had been a few farmers’ carts. Now it was packed with jostling, yelling people—pushing, stumbling, swearing; trying to cross the hills to Prague before the Russians caught them.

Fear like that can spread, too, to people who don’t have anything to be afraid of. All of the people running from the Russians weren’t Germans. I remember a British lance corporal, for instance, who George and I saw strutting toward Prague as though the Devil was after him.

“Better get a move on, Yanks!” he puffed. “Rooskies only a couple of miles back, you know. Don’t want to mix it with them, do you?”

One nice thing about being half-starved, which I gather the lance corporal wasn’t, is that it’s hard to worry about anything but being half-starved. “You’ve got it all wrong, Mac,” I shouted back at him. “We’re on their side, the way I understand it.”

“They’re not asking where you’re from, Yank. They’re shooting everything they can catch for the fun of it.” He rounded the bend and was out of sight.

I laughed, but I was in for a surprise when I turned back to George. He was running his stubby fingers through his red mop of hair, and his fat moon face was white as he looked down the road in the direction the Russians would be coming from. That was something none of us had ever seen before—George afraid.

Until then, he’d been in command of every situation, whether it was with us or with the Germans. He had a thick skin, and he could bluff or wheedle his way out of anything.

Alvin York would have been impressed with some of his combat stories. We were all from the same division, except for George. He’d been brought in all by himself, and he said he’d been up front since D-Day. The rest of us were from a green outfit, captured in a breakthrough before we’d been in the line a week. George was a real campaigner, and entitled to a lot of respect. He got it; begrudged, all right, but he got it—until Jerry got killed.

“Call me a stool pigeon again, buddy, and I’ll smash your ugly face in,” I heard him tell one guy whose whispers he’d overheard. “You know damn well you’d do the same thing, if you had the chance. I’m just playing the guards for chumps. They think I’m on their side, so they treat me pretty good. I’m not hurting you none, so mind your own damn business!”

That was a few days after the break, after Jerry Sullivan got killed. Somebody’d tipped off the guards about the break, or at least it looked that way. They were waiting outside the fence, at the mouth of the tunnel, when Jerry, the first man through, crawled out. They didn’t have to shoot him, but they did. Maybe George hadn’t told the guards—but nobody gave him the benefit of that doubt when he was out of hearing.

Nobody said anything to his face. He was big and healthy, remember, and went on getting beefier and worse-tempered, while the rest of us were turning into drowsy scarecrows.

But now, with the Russians on their way, George’s nerve seemed to have given out. “Let’s make a break for Prague, Sammy. Just you and me, so we can travel fast,” he said.

“What in hell’s the matter with you?” I said. “We don’t have to run from anybody, George. We just won a war, and you’re acting like we lost one. Prague’s sixty miles away, for God’s sake. The Russians’ll be here in an hour or so, and they’ll probably send trucks to run us back to our lines. Take it easy, George—you don’t hear any shooting, do you?”

“They’ll shoot us, Sammy, sure as hell. You don’t even look like an American soldier. They’re wild men, Sammy. Come on, let’s go while we got the chance.”

He had a point about my clothes. They were ripped and stained and patched, and I looked more like a resident of skid row than an American soldier. But, as you might expect, George still looked pretty sharp. The guards kept him in cigarettes as well as food, and he could trade the smokes for just about anything in camp he wanted. He got himself several changes of clothes that way, and the guards let him use an iron they had in their shack, so he was the camp fashion plate.

His game was over now. Nobody had to trade with him anymore, and the men who’d taken such good care of him were gone. Maybe that’s what was scaring him, and not the Russians. “Let’s go, Sammy,” he said. He was pleading with me, a person he hadn’t had a friendly word for in eight months at close quarters.

“Go ahead, if you want to,” I said. “You don’t have to ask my permission, George. Go on. I’m staying here with the rest of the guys.”

He didn’t move. “You and me, Sammy, we’ll stick together.” He grinned and draped his arm around my shoulders.

I twisted away, and walked across the prison yard. All we had in common was red hair. He worried me: I couldn’t figure out what his angle was on suddenly becoming a great pal of mine. And George was the kind of guy who always had an angle.

He followed me across the yard, and put his big arm around my shoulders again. “O.K., Sammy, we’ll stay here and wait.”

“I don’t give a damn what you do.”

“O.K., O.K.,” he laughed. “I was just going to suggest, since we got an hour or so to wait, why don’t you and me go down the road a piece and see if we can’t get us some smokes and souvenirs? Both speaking German, we ought to make out real good, you and me.”

I was dying for a smoke, and he knew it. I’d traded him my gloves for two cigarettes a couple of months before—when it had been plenty cold—and I hadn’t had one since. George started me thinking about what that first inhale would be like. There’d be cigarettes in the nearest town, Peterswald, two uphill miles away.

“Whaddya say, Sammy?”

I shrugged. “What the hell—let’s go.”

“Attaboy.”

“Where you going?” yelled one of the guys in the prison yard.

“Out to have us a quick look around,” George answered.

“Be back in an hour,” I added.

“Want some company?” yelled the guy.

George kept on walking, and didn’t answer. “Get a mob, and they’ll louse up everything,” he said winking. “Two’s just right.”

I looked at him. He had a smile fixed on his face, but that didn’t keep me from seeing that he was still plenty scared.

“What are you afraid of, George?”

“Old Georgie afraid of something? That’ll be the day.”

We took our place in the noisy crowd, and began to climb the gentle grade to Peterswald.

II.

Sometimes, when I think about what happened in Peterswald, I make excuses for myself—that I was drunk, that I was a little crazy after having been locked up and hungry for so long. The hell of it is that I wasn’t forced into doing what I did. I wasn’t cornered. I did it because I wanted to.

Peterswald wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d hoped for at least a store or two where we could beg or steal a couple of cigarettes and something to eat. But the town wasn’t anything more than two dozen farms, each with a wall and a ten-foot gate. They were jammed together on a green hilltop, overlooking the fields, so that they formed a solid fort. With tanks and artillery on their way, though, Peterswald was nothing but a pretty push-over, and it didn’t look like anybody felt like making the Russians fight for it.

Here and there a white flag—a bedsheet on the end of a broomstick—fluttered from a second-story window. Every gate stood open—unconditional surrender.

“This looks as good as any,” said George. He gripped my arm, steered me out of the mob, through the gate, and into the hard-packed courtyard of the first farm we came to.

The yard was closed in on three sides by the house and farm buildings, with the wall and gate across the fourth. Looking through the open doors into the vacant barns, and through the windows into the still house, I felt for the first time like what I really was—a worried stranger. Up to then, I’d walked, talked, and acted as though I was a special case, an American, somehow out of this European mess, without a damn thing to be afraid of. Walking into a ghost town changed my mind—

Or maybe I was beginning to be afraid of George. Saying that now may be hindsight—I don’t know for sure. Maybe, down deep, I
was
starting to wonder. His eyes were too big and interested whenever I said something, and he couldn’t keep his hands off me, pawing, patting, slapping; and every time he talked about what he wanted to do next, it was “You and me, Sammy…”

“Hello!” he shouted. He got a quick echo from the walls around us, and then silence. He still held my arm, and he gave it a squeeze. “Ain’t this cozy, Sammy? Looks like we got the place all to ourselves.” He pushed the big gate shut, and slid the thick wooden cross-bar across it. I don’t think I could have budged the gate then, but George had moved it without even changing his expression. He walked back to my side, dusting his hands and grinning.

“What’s the angle, George?”

“To the victor go the spoils—ain’t that right?” He kicked open the front door. “Well, go on in, kid. Help yourself. Georgie’s just fixed things so nobody’s going to bother us till we’ve got the pick of the stuff. Go find something real nice for your mother and your girlfriend, huh?”

“All I want is a smoke,” I said. “You can open the damn gate as far as I’m concerned.”

George took a package of cigarettes from his field jacket pocket. “Here’s the kind of buddy I am,” he laughed. “Have one.”

“What’s the idea of making me walk all the way to Peterswald for a cigarette, when you had a whole pack?”

He walked into the house. “I like your company, Sammy. You ought to feel real complimented. Redheads ought to stick together.”

“Let’s get out of here, George.”

“The gate’s shut. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Sammy, just like you said. Brighten up. Go out in the kitchen and get something to eat. That’s all that’s the matter with you. You’ll kick yourself for the rest of your life if you pass up a deal like this.” He turned his back, and started pulling out drawers, emptying them on a tabletop, and picking over the contents. He whistled an old dance tune I hadn’t heard since the late thirties.

I stood in the middle of the room, getting a dizzy, dreamy lift out of the first deep drags on the cigarette. I closed my eyes, and, when I opened them again, George didn’t worry me anymore. There wasn’t anything to be afraid of—the growing nightmare feeling was gone. I relaxed.

“Whoever lived here took off in a hurry,” said George, still with his back to me. He held up a small bottle. “Forgot their heart medicine. My old lady used to have this stuff around the house for her heart.” He laid it back in the drawer. “Same in German as it is in English. Funny thing about strychnine, Sammy—little doses can save your life.” He dropped a pair of earrings into his bulging pocket. “These’ll make some little girl very happy,” he said.