Prisoners of War (20 page)

THIRTY FIVE

AFTER A SLOW START, the Germans’ farmwork had improved. It didn’t hurt that, in accordance with the Geneva Convention, they received eighty cents per day, as long as they met the minimum daily quota of a hundred pounds apiece. Right now, Dan knew, they were being compensated in camp scrip, but Marty said the army had set up a savings plan so they could take partial payment in hard currency when the war ended, if they chose. Whatever the reason, they’d become zealous about picking cotton, especially the tall guy named Voss, who had such little ears.

They were in the habit of weighing up three times every day: once around ten-thirty, again at two, then a final time when they quit for the day. Dan’s route brought him back near his fields in late morning, so he usually handled the first weigh-up, while Alvin drove over and took care of the second. Then, after Dan finished his route, he weighed their cotton one last time and hauled them back to Camp Loring.

A fair amount of horseplay occurred that morning as the POWs waited near the trailer in unusually high spirits. In mid-October, for the second time in two months, the Allies had flown a raid over some town in Germany called Schweinfurt, where there was a big armament factory, and according to the sketchy news in the paper and on the radio, their losses had again been terrible. You could never be sure how much the prisoners knew, but reports of this disaster—already dubbed “Black Thursday”—might have reached them by now.

Voss hoisted his sack onto his shoulder and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, humming what sounded like a polka, while Dan broke out the scales. Then the lanky German hung the sack, stood back and watched it being weighed.

“Seventy-six pounds, six ounces.”

One of the other prisoners wagged his finger at Voss, who grinned and bent over and stood still as each of the others, except Schultz, strode up behind him and gently kicked him in the rear. After taking his punishment, Voss freed his sack, hurled it up into the trailer, then climbed in after it and dumped out the cotton.

One by one, the others followed, hanging their sacks from the scales, then stepping back to watch while Dan weighed them. Voss remained in the trailer. After Dan recorded the weights, each would hand his sack up to Voss, who’d empty it and then fling it over the side plank.

Schultz was the last to weigh up. As he stepped back so Dan could balance the scales, Voss climbed out of the trailer and jumped down, stirring up dust where he landed.

“Thirty-four pounds.”

One of the other prisoners shook his head and said something to Voss in German, and Voss said something back as they strapped on their sacks.

For a moment or two, Schultz watched the others heading off into the field. Then he turned back to the trailer and detached his sack from the scales.

“I’ll get up there in the trailer,” Dan told him, “and you pass me the sack.”

“I climb,” Schultz said. “Is okay.”

Three good-sized pieces of two-by-four had been nailed to the front end planks. Schultz gripped the top one, planted his foot on the bottom one and swung himself into the trailer, reached over the side plank and grabbed the sack, then dumped the cotton and packed it down.

Dan was already walking back to the rolling store when the chunk of two-by-four came loose. He didn’t see it happen, just heard the loud squawk of a nail tearing free from the wood and, a second later, the German’s groan. Climbing out, he’d apparently fallen straight down onto the iron tongue. When Dan ran around to the front of the trailer, he was splayed across it, face contorted in pain as he struggled for breath.

“Jesus,” Dan said.

Schultz’s lips scarcely moved: “Side pain.”

Dan gripped him under one arm and helped him sit up, then gently probed his rib cage. “Does that hurt?”

“Hurt. Yes.”

“We better get you back to the camp. Can you walk if I help you?”

“Yes, I think.”

Dan helped him to his feet and, with the German’s arm looped around his shoulders, walked him over to the rolling store.

The other prisoners had quit picking. The one who’d wagged his finger at Voss started to lift the strap off his shoulder, but after looking over at Voss, he let his arm fall and stood watching while Dan started the engine and pulled into the road. Once the others disappeared from view, Schultz relaxed considerably, his shoulders no longer hunched in pain. For a mile or so, he sat quietly, observing the cotton fields passing in a blur. Then, as they neared the highway, he shifted his position, so Dan could see his face.

“Please?” he said. “One moment?”

“Yeah?”

“Not hurt,” the German said.

“What?”

“Not hurt.” To prove it, he patted his rib cage. “I lie.”

Dan let off the accelerator. “Why?”

“I have desire to talk.”

“To me?”

“To you, yes. But also with American officer. From prisoner camp. Very important.”

“How come you didn’t just say so?”

“Other prisoner must not to know. Please. I tell to
Kommandant.
Everything.”

When he reached the highway, Dan turned the bus around and drove the prisoner to his own house, where he picked up the receiver and heard his mother’s voice on the other end saying, “Danny? Danny? Is that you?”

Waiting for the captain to arrive, Dan offered the prisoner a glass of water, which he accepted with gratitude, ducking his head. He sat on the couch, drinking, his eyes roaming the walls, taking in all the pictures, including the one of Shirley in a porch swing, sitting between Alvin and Jimmy Del Timms. She’d hung it up a month or so after the funeral, and when Dan asked her why he’d never seen it before, she said it was because his father hadn’t liked it.

He believed then that what his father hadn’t liked was Alvin’s proximity to Shirley, the way her head inclined toward him rather than toward the man who became her husband, and the position of Alvin’s hand—in suspended motion, as if it had just been removed from her knee. Though he didn’t discount that as a reason now, he’d begun to wonder if his father’s aversion might not also have involved the uniform he wore.

Dan had never actually seen the uniform. The only time he’d asked to, his father claimed he’d burned it. He’d earned medals and citations, as well—Dan had learned as much by listening to him talking with Ralph Hobgood those afternoons on the porch—but nobody, as far as he knew, had ever been granted a glimpse of them. After his father’s death, they’d never surfaced.

The POW nodded at the photo. “Your father?”

“Yeah.”

“Which one?”

“The soldier. The other one’s my uncle Alvin—the fellow that comes and weighs y’all’s cotton sometimes.”

“Brother is twin?”

Dan had never thought they resembled each other all that much. But in the photograph, he had to admit, the similarity was striking. “No. My father was a year older.”

The prisoner stood and walked over to examine the picture more closely. “In First Division your father was?”

“I think so.”

“Big Red One.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Where is father now?”

“Dead.”

Either Dan looked older than he was or the prisoner was bad at math, because he said, “Killed in last war?”

Dan didn’t know what he’d say until it was said—and then, whether it was a lie. “No. In this one.”

The POW returned to the couch and sat down, and they both fell silent, neither meeting the other’s eye until fifteen minutes later, when the scout car pulled into the yard and Marty climbed out, followed by Captain Munson.

“Escape . . .” As the prisoner searched for a word, the skin on his cheekbones wrinkled, sending red ripples through the ugly stain. “Escape
meeting,
” he finally said. “They have each day.”

“When?” Munson asked.

“After night meal.”

“Where?”

“In different place. This tent or that one.”

Munson had withdrawn a pencil and a small notebook from his pocket, but he hadn’t written a word. “How many are planning to go?”

“I don’t know. Four, I think. Maybe more go.”

“Where in the world do they plan to escape to?”

“Meksyk Gulf.”

The captain shook his head, as if he’d never heard anything quite so ridiculous. “They want to go for a swim or what?”

The prisoner shrugged. “Wait for
Boot.”

“You’re telling me they’ve already arranged their own transportation?”

“Voss say
Boot
to come. I don’t know.”

“It’s close to three hundred miles from here to the Gulf. How do they plan to get there?”

“Steal auto.”

“The countryside’s crawling with military police and Civil Defense patrols. The first time they got stopped, they’d be asked for their papers.”

The prisoner wet his lips, and for a moment or two he hesitated. “They make many
dokument.
”

“What kind of documents?”

He glanced at Dan. “Driver license. Military name card.”

Dan said, “It was
them
that stole my wallet?”

The prisoner dipped his head. “I steal. Sorry.”

“You took this young man’s driver’s license,” Munson said, “and his identification card?”

“Yes, I take.”

“Why?”

“I, too, think to go. Now, no.” He told them, in his fragmented English, how he’d stolen a bottle of ink from the duty hut, snatched a potato from the mess hall and used a nail to engrave printing plates made from cast-off linoleum—he pronounced it
lee-no-LAY-oom
—that he’d discovered behind the supply shed. He’d been hiding in the showers, making documents of his own, when Voss caught him. “They force me to make for them,” he said. “Now they have.”

Munson laid his pad and pencil on the coffee table. “Where in the name of God did you get the idea to forge documents using ink and potatoes?”

“In Polish school, how children make picture.”

The entire time Munson was questioning the prisoner, Marty had been standing by the front door, his arms folded over his chest. Now he cleared his throat. “Sir?”

At first, Dan thought the captain meant to ignore him, and he hated seeing his friend embarrassed. But Munson finally responded. “You want to say something, Stark?”

“Yes sir.” For once, Marty looked like a soldier. His uniform was freshly laundered, his bearing erect. “If those fellows are unsupervised out there in my buddy’s cotton patch—well, shouldn’t one of us get over there and keep an eye on ’em?”

“If you were one of those fellows,” the captain said, “and accustomed to not seeing anybody except the occasional MPs driving by in a scout car, then suddenly an armed guard’s scrutinizing your every move—what would that suggest to you?”

“I see what you’re saying, sir.”

“Stark,” the captain replied, “you may make a soldier yet. In a year or two, the way things are going, you might be commanding me.”

“I sincerely doubt it, sir.”

“Well, you never can tell. Who would have thought that our guest here would be running a printing press under our noses?” He smoothed the creases from his shirtsleeves, then leaned back in his chair and cocked his head. To the prisoner, he said, “If you’d managed to escape, where did you plan to go?”

The prisoner’s hands lay in his lap. For a moment or two, he gazed at them while gently massaging the base of his left thumb with his right index finger. His answer, when he gave it, was not the one the captain wanted, or at least not one he appeared to believe, but it made perfect sense to Dan.

“I don’t know,” the prisoner said. “Just leave here. Go anywhere.”

THIRTY SIX

AWAITING ROLL CALL, the prisoners congregated inside the gates. If any of them noticed that for the first time in months the towers were being manned before dusk, they didn’t let on. They stood around laughing, bullshitting one another, happy that the hot weather was over.

Earlier that afternoon, Marty and Kimball had found forged documents stashed in the hollow metal legs of Voss’s cot. The driver’s license didn’t look too bad, except that Schultz had put only one
p
in Mississippi and must have gotten confused when converting from the metric system: John Klein, according to the license, stood six foot six, and while that was probably close to Voss’s actual height, his weight was given as eighty-five pounds.

The Mississippi State Guard card issued to John Klein could conceivably have satisfied a Civil Defense officer. If it failed to, another document, typed on the Royal in the duty hut, stated that Klein was “nationality of Switzerland” but had lived in the United States since 1936. For good measure, the document alleged that he was “loyal to American cause,” and bore the official stamp of the United States Army.

They found a second driver’s license in another prisoner’s cot. Other documents, all variations on those issued to John Klein, turned up as well. In all, it appeared, at least four and possibly five men were planning to escape.

You could tell the captain was shaken—reporting this to Fourth Service Command would hardly make his stock rise with the brass—but at the same time he was impressed. “You weren’t in intelligence, were you?” he’d asked Schultz earlier, as they left the tent with the forgeries in hand.

“Intelligent, no, I was not,” Schultz said.

Case and Kimball laughed at that, but Munson didn’t, and neither did Marty.

No documents pertaining to the prisoner’s own background had turned up, but Marty no longer doubted that he was what he claimed to be—a Pole who’d served in the Wehrmacht. The remaining question had nothing to do with the prisoner’s origin. It was a more fundamental question, one that defied boundaries of the type imposed by nations or advancing fronts: who
was
this guy? To answer that, you had to know not only where he’d been but also his ultimate destination.

The Pole was often wrapped in gauzy light. It had surrounded him the first time Marty saw him, that day Schultz— or Szulc—caught his shirt on tin siding, and again the night he emerged from the shadows and walked to the tower. They’d looked at each other for a good while then, but you couldn’t say with certainty exactly how long, because time, in the ordinary sense, had stopped flowing.

Marty’s drill sergeant back in basic had been a Jew from the East Coast, a man who, at the age of thirty-five, had left a teaching position at the University of Delaware to join the army, where he once more became a master of instruction. Most men’s lives, he was fond of saying, broke down into a series of “incremental moments,” and the tragedy of human existence was that virtually nobody could predict when those moments would occur. Generally, they passed before you knew you’d lived through them, assuming of course that you
did
live through them. Though not all incremental moments involved physical danger, a great many of them did.

“What I’m here to teach you,” he’d said, “is how to survive an incremental moment. The first thing you’ve got to develop is a willingness to trust your senses. A dog smells fear. You guys have spent most of your lives learning not to be dogs. Now it’s time to accept your own canine nature. You want to smell what others can’t smell. You want to hear what they don’t hear. You want the pores of your bodies to open up and let sensory data rush in, and you want to respond without thinking. If your senses tell you that a form—not a man, I repeat, a
form
—in your immediate vicinity poses a threat to you, you turn into one big fang, dripping saliva. Everything you see and hear and smell is
real.
The one statement you can never allow your brain to communicate to your arms and legs, your feet or your hands, is as follows:
This can’t be happening.
It can be, and it will be, and if you fail to recognize that, you will not survive those incremental moments. If you do survive them, you’ll most likely never again be able to experience reality in the very limited way that most men and women customarily do. You may come to mourn your inability to do so, and you may blame me for that, but all I can say is, I’d rather be a living dog, able to feel the grass beneath its paws, than a dead man with a bullet and a worm in his well-adjusted brain.”

Marty’s senses kept telling him that the Pole was more than just another prisoner, that the mark on his face was an identifying trait, that no moment spent in his presence was ordinary. He didn’t know why this was so. He just knew that since first setting eyes on the man, he’d sensed a connection between them. He didn’t know why it existed, but he was beginning to believe that he’d survived that day on the Niscemi road, despite failing to trust his senses and either pull the trigger or turn and run, so that he might have another chance. And that other chance had something to do with the Pole.

That afternoon Case had led the prisoner off to the infirmary, where they planned to keep him for the evening. While Kimball lingered by the scout car, Marty followed Munson. “Sir?” he said. “Could I speak with you?”

“What is it, Private?”

“Shouldn’t we get that fellow out of here, send him somewhere else?”

The captain had placed the forgeries in an accordion file, which he clutched against his chest. “What would you have me do, Stark? Let you march him out into the cotton patch and shoot him?”

“No sir. That’s what I’m scared those Germans’ll do.”

The Pole himself had suggested as much. That was why he’d decided to confess, he said. They wanted him dead, and before leaving, he believed, they meant to kill him. They hadn’t trusted him since the day he came to camp. They hadn’t even trusted him before that. “In my unit,” he said, “two time German soldier shoot me. Both time miss. Officer once try. To English I escape. Happy capture.”

Now Munson said, “You’ve done a one-eighty on our prisoner, haven’t you, Stark?”

“I guess so, sir. I believe him anyway.”

“You’re real big on belief, aren’t you?”

“Yes sir. I guess I am.”

“Yet you don’t strike me as the churchgoing type.”

“No sir, I’m not, though I was raised to be. But there’s different kinds of belief, sir. I believe this is the ground I’m standing on. I don’t know it—I just act like I do.” He realized he ought to stop talking, but for some reason he couldn’t. “If I didn’t act on my belief that this stuff beneath my feet was the ground, there’s no telling what I might do. I imagine the same’s true for you. Sir.”

“You’re one of the more complicated people I’ve come across, Stark. I even have a feeling that if I’d met you under a different set of circumstances, I probably would’ve enjoyed knowing you. But right now,” he said, stepping closer and slapping his thigh with the file, “you’re annoying the living hell out of me. I’ll decide what to do with that fellow. I’ll decide it in my own good time, after consulting my superiors, and until that time, I don’t want to hear a word about him out of you. Is that clear, Stark?”

“Yes sir.”

Munson turned and headed for his quarters.

“But sir?”

The captain didn’t exactly stop, but he did slow his pace.

“Sir, I got a feeling the ground’s gone open up.”

The prisoners formed themselves into perfectly straight lines, and the sergeant called off all the names himself, one at a time, rather than sending the guards among the labor detachments to check them group by group. The new procedure was the first indication the prisoners received that something out of the ordinary might have happened.

Stationed along the fence, to the right of the gates, Marty got a good view of Voss. Half a head higher than anybody else, he stood in the third position, in the second row, legs together, shoulders back, his chest jutting forth. He stared straight ahead, but once or twice his tongue flicked out and mopped his lips.

Case continued alphabetically, and when he’d checked off the last name, he handed the clipboard to Huggins, who carried it into the captain’s quarters. For a moment or two, nobody moved or said a word. Marty raised his eyes and gazed across the rec area at the south tower, where Brinley stood impassively, his fist wrapped around the muzzle of his rifle.

The door to the captain’s quarters opened, and Munson stepped out, followed by Huggins. The captain wore his side arm and carried the accordion file. He strode across the yard, ignoring Case’s brisk salute.

He handed the file to Huggins, then addressed the prisoners. “When you men were processed as POWs,” he said, speaking loudly and clearly, for the benefit of those who understood English and would be expected to inform the rest, “you received from the Red Cross a document prepared by your government, titled ‘Memorandum Addressed to German Soldiers.’ It urged you to remain physically fit and stay informed of the rights guaranteed you by the Geneva Convention, and it also reminded you that it was your duty, as a soldier, to do everything within your power to escape.

“What it didn’t tell you is something you had ample opportunity to observe for yourselves, when you made your train journeys from New Jersey or Maryland or wherever your processing center was to the place where you find yourselves right now. This is one big country. But just in case you didn’t study a lot of foreign geography in school, let me provide a few points of comparison.

“The distance between New York City and Los Angeles is almost exactly three times the distance between Paris and Warsaw. The distance from the front gates over there to, let’s say, the Gulf of Mexico isn’t nearly so great, a mere four hundred and fifty kilometers. But the Gulf Coast might as well be on Jupiter, because the probability that any of you men could get there is zero.

“We’ve got military police on all the major roads, and Civil Defense patrols on all the minor ones. You men couldn’t be expected to know too much about Mississippi, but this state’s home to the meanest law-enforcement officers in the nation. Hunting season’s a big deal down here, too, and I doubt the local sportsmen would mind a little target practice.”

He stuck his hand out, and Huggins gave him back the file. The captain withdrew the forged documents, all of which had been clipped together. He waved the stack in the air. “Some of you men—not a lot, just a few—were apparently planning to take a vacation. I assure you that’s all it would have been. A day away at most, but probably not even that. Some of you had phony driver’s licenses, a few forged Mississippi State Guard cards, a couple of grammatically incorrect affidavits that attempt to explain why the bearer—whose English, if he speaks any, identifies him as a foreigner—ought to be regarded as a loyal American, exempt from active duty in the military for a variety of reasons, including my own personal favorite”—he riffled the documents until he located the one he wanted— “‘total pain in bottom back.’” He stood there staring at the stack of forgeries and shaking his head, as if unable to imagine how anybody with any sense could concoct such an escapade.

The truth was that there weren’t nearly as many MPs or Civil Defense officers out there as Munson said, and the locals weren’t uniformly hostile to the Germans. The other afternoon, while Marty was on duty at the gate, one of the returning prisoners had climbed out of Bob Brown’s pickup truck with a watermelon in his arms. When asked where the hell he’d gotten it, the German said, “Farmer give,” so Marty let him carry it on in. Later, he learned that the prisoners didn’t know exactly what a watermelon was. After some discussion, they split it open, scooped the pulp out and boiled it until they were left with sugar extract. Then they stripped the skin off and boiled the rind, along with the sugar, and made themselves a marmalade, which they spread on their bread at breakfast.

These were resourceful people, who would make something out of whatever you gave them. If he wanted, Munson could stand up there and shake his head, as though confronted by a bunch of wayward children, but they were neither wayward nor children. If the goals they’d set seemed unrealistic, their pursuit of them was nothing to scorn.

“Just as the Geneva Convention guarantees prisoners of war certain rights,” the captain continued, “it also specifies what their captors can do to punish them in the event of an attempted escape. There’s a wide range of options available. Prisoners can simply be issued a reprimand. They can be forced to perform extra fatigue duty during their free time. They can be ordered to work without pay, placed on restricted diet, or confined to the camp stockade for up to thirty days.

“The
Kommandant
of one of your camps, if confronted with a similar situation, would most likely begin with the harshest-possible response under international law—if, in fact, he felt himself limited by law. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to begin with the most lenient response, which is to tell all of you, but especially the men in whose cots these illegal documents were discovered, that this is a warning. If we find any further evidence of an attempt to leave this camp, for any purpose other than authorized work details, the prisoners involved will be locked up in that little brick building behind the showers, which Sergeant Case informs me is infested with red ants big enough to eat a man’s flesh and then carry off his bones.”