The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (11 page)

The General takes the newspaper from Bandy’s grasp. He wads it and rattles it over the giant map, as though to shake the black words off the thin new sheets, separate them and sprinkle them like raindrops over western Europe and the American troops bunched there in the blue crayon arrows; let the American soldier defeat those words like they beat the Germans, let truth win by their hands. Bandy sees one more photograph for the ages slide by, untaken.

Eisenhower retracts the newspaper. He folds the pages, then drops the lump on the table.

Ike’s storm has passed.”Field Marshal Montgomery and I,” he says with theatrical quiet, “will discuss this at a later date.”

The General smiles again. He sees Bandy in front of him, not Monty.

“I’m sorry, Charley, did you come to see me about something, or was this a social call?”

“I do have a favor I’d like to ask of you, General.”

“Fire away.”

“Well, sir, if I’m right, there doesn’t seem to be much of the war left.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Then, I was hoping you might give me a tip as to where the action’s going to be.”

“Action.”

“I’ve got a job to do, General. Pictures of the officers’ mess don’t pay the bills.”

“You haven’t seen enough action, son?”

“My wife call you?”

Eisenhower chuckles. Bandy knows how to play the brave bumpkin.

He presses. “General, there’s going to be lots of newsies here in these last few months. Guys who haven’t even got their feet wet. Me, I figure I’ve earned a leg up by this point. It’s what I came back for. The end. I want to be there. Not chasing off somewhere else far from it, looking at someone else’s photos and kicking myself. That’s for the others.”

“I see.” Eisenhower winces, considering. “The end.”

“Yes, sir. Can you point me? Where should I head to have the best shot? Whose army?”

“You want me to guess.”

“Who better, General?”

Bandy holds still while Eisenhower mulls this request over. Without more words from either, the General’s gaze goes to the big table map. Ike calculates for moments. His hand wanders over the chart, sensing contours, troops, possibilities, personalities, enemies.

“Action, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

Ike’s fingers wriggle in the low firmament over an area south of Montgomery’s force, north of Patton. He studies the American front line at the middle, facing the Ruhr region, site of seventy-five percent of Germany’s remaining industry, seventy percent of their coal.

Eisenhower lifts his eyes to meet Bandy’s. The General’s look is sympathetic, paternal, as though at this last second he wants the younger man with the wife and tobacco farm at home, who has already lived in harm’s way more than most soldiers, to reconsider his entreaty for action. The look asks: Son, are you one of those unlucky men who is at his most alive in the presence of death? Bandy makes a forgiving smile.

Like a crashing spear, one of the General’s fingers lands and sticks. Bandy leans over to read.

Ike has spiked a spot on the northern reaches of the Siegfried Line.

Beneath his nail is the lethal Hürtgen Forest.

“Right here, Charley.”

~ * ~

January 14, 1945, 0700 hours

Magnuszew bridgehead

West
bank of the Vistula River

Poland

there have been no orders issued for the attack. but the canny
foot soldier learns to read the signs of his army the way a timber wolf reads his forest. Ilya smells food. When the cooks move their kitchens up, that means only one thing. You are going forward.

The offensive will erupt this morning.

The jingle-jangle of pot-laden mess wagons splits the thick mist. Last night was starry, but at midnight a heavy fog rolled in. Ilya cannot imagine ordering an attack this morning, with visibility down to four or five meters. There can be no air cover in this chilly haze. But there it is, the unmistakable aroma of eggs and frying potatoes salting the air.

Ilya sits up in the trench. He shrugs his great shoulders. They ache, sopped with dew and cold from the riverbank night. His blanket is wet. He runs a hand over his shaved pate and slides off his woolen cap, uses it to wipe his eyes. Misha next to him has spilled from under his blanket in the night and curled into a little ball, a filthy puppy. Ilya covers Misha with both blankets now and rises. Misha mumbles and will not wake.

Ilya tracks the smell and sound of the carts. Loudspeakers blare Russian folk music across no-man’s-land at the German lines to hide the clatter of preparations, another sure sign that the hour is near. Last night, sappers will have crawled out to clear mines from in front of the Russian trenches, and even dared go as far as they could to do the same in front of the German positions. The mist helped with that much of the operation, but this morning the attack will be more difficult without the Red Air Force Stormoviks spreading a carpet of bombs and bullets in advance. Oh, well, Ilya thinks. The artillery doesn’t need to see what they’re doing. All their targets are presighted. And in the infantry, you shoot anything facing you. Simple.

Two dawns ago, Koniev’s First Ukrainian Front jumped off from their Sandomierz bridgehead on the Vistula a hundred kilometers to the south. They’ll slash northwest, while Ilya’s force—the First Byelorussian Front— will battle straight westward. They’ll all line up on the border to Germany, the river Oder, eighty kilometers from Berlin.

Ilya reaches the A Company mess wagon. Without asking for it, he is handed a double portion. Misha will get the same when he rallies and comes for breakfast. The cooks, everyone in the company, know who stole the First Guards Tank Army banner. Others shamble forward, accept steaming tin plates, and squat to eat. On each of their coats is sewn a black-and-orange patch from First Tank. This is Misha’s doing. When the tank army’s flag was discovered fluttering on the pole outside Chuikov’s Eighth Guards HQ, a note was found pinned to it identifying the penal battalion, A Company. For days afterward the men of the company bragged and strutted, many of them holding their chins high for the first time in a long while, though they did not know who among them had pulled off the prank. The commander and commissar of A Company held a meeting, demanding to know who was responsible. Misha stepped forward. The soldiers held their breath, figuring the little coward was going to rat on their unknown hero. Misha insisted he would tell, but only if First Guards Tank Army surrendered one hundred fifty patches for the entire company to wear as trophies. “Victory must have a prize,” he intoned. The commissar gave his word. Misha thumped his own chest. “Me.”

Misha spent three days in the stockade. When he came out, Ilya hugged him, then sewed on his friend’s First Tank patch. Over the next week, Misha told each member of the company, swearing them one by one to secrecy, that Ilya was the leader of their escapade and they could never tell because Ilya was as ferocious as he looked. Misha figured the news would filter upward to the company and battalion officers, and there would be no further negative repercussions.

The little man’s voice grumbles through the fog behind Ilya.

“It’s today.”

“No question.”

Misha collects his rations, pushes half of it onto Ilya’s plate, and sits.

“You know who’s out there, Ilyushka?”

“The Germans.”

“The Ninth Army. One of the best armies in the whole
Wehrmacht.
General von Lüttwitz commanding. He’s the latest in a long line of great generals with the Ninth. Model and von Bock both made Field Marshal out of there. Lüttwitz is good, and he fights.”

Ilya shakes his head, polishes off the extra eggs. “How do you know this?”

“I ask questions. That’s what I do. Intelligence. Besides, I spent three days at HQ in the stockade. When I can’t ask, I listen.”

Ilya sets down his plate. He pushes his gaze through the mist, past Misha, at the others gathering for their last hot meal before the assault. They’re a ragged bunch, careless with their demeanor. Their pride in the successful pilferage two weeks ago has been worn off by hard labor, cold ground, and the wait. These soldiers are resigned to being on the crest of the coming attack, where the penal company stays. And if they don’t get killed in today’s assault, then the next one. Most of them are country boys, simpletons who broke one rule too many or mouthed off to a superior. There are a few black-sheep officers, like Misha and Ilya, but those men keep to themselves. There is little camaraderie in the company; the faces change. Men are killed, go AWOL, wind up in the brig, or get a bullet in the back of the head for more serious infractions. The battalion commissar tries hard to meld them together with communist fervor. But these slumping men are just broken spirits slogging out what will likely prove to be their last days in earthly form.

Misha says the Ninth Army is one of the best. They had better be, Ilya thinks, because they have not fought Russians before like the ones they’ll fight today. The Red soldiers and officers of the main ranks will battle hard, true enough. They’re well trained and have the finest mass of weapons ever assembled. By this point in the war, the Reds are toughened and wise to the man. And Ilya doesn’t worry about the fighting mettle of his penal company. They’ll go all out too, either to die with some final honor attached to their names or to win their way back to their regular units, like Ilya and Misha. The German Ninth knows how well the Soviet army fights; for two years they’ve been backpedaling in front of them across western Russia and the Ukraine, starting at Stalingrad. The ruthlessness of the German retreat from their occupied territories is seared into the mind’s eye of every Ivan soldier on the front: scorched villages, brutalized women, senseless butchery. The Germans must know they will face a determined enemy today.

But the men of the second echelon, the mop-up wave behind the Red frontline troops. These are men the Ninth Army has not yet seen. These are animals.

In the past twenty months, the advancing army has liberated hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers from German prison camps. These men have been tortured, starved, and humiliated by their captors. They’ve been slaves on their own soil, and those of their comrades who escaped did so as corpses. Now the survivors have been set free to seek their vengeance, with a fanatical hatred.

Comrade Stalin has ordered that all freed POWs fit for service be fed, clothed, issued arms, and sent back into battle. But the
vozhd
does not trust these men entirely; they have been in the presence of the enemy. So, they are segregated into the second tier of soldiers, behind the main attack forces. Once the enemy’s front lines have been broken, the Red Army regulars will continue to press the attack, battling their way forward, while the second echelon follows along in ever-swelling numbers.

Ilya has seen their crazed “mopping-up” work: German soldiers bound face-to-face with wire, a grenade stuck between their chests and the pin pulled. Piles of burning corpses smoldering an hour after they dropped their weapons alive. Mutilated bodies of men left naked in subzero weather, their testicles cut off. Machine gun cross fire over open fields, blood and bullet holes desecrating white flags of surrender. More, Ilya has seen.

Some say, “If Stalin knew, he would stop it.” Ilya is certain, Stalin knows.

He wonders what these wild men will do once they are across the Oder, on German ground. They are not being reined in by their officers. They’re being stoked to a rage by the bellows of communist rhetoric, Kill, Kill, Kill! The revenge-taking will get worse.

By 0730, rumbling activity is everywhere in the Magnuszew bridgehead. Ilya and Misha return to their trench dodging rolling tanks, wagon after wagon of artillery ammunition, and columns of trucks collecting bedrolls and blankets to be redistributed later. The fog makes the bustle dicey, the two hear a shrouded collision between vehicles.