The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (19 page)

“Take her!” the landlord demands. “Take her. We can’t leave her in here!”

Some of the women have already scurried up the stairs to flee this cellar for the street. Three of them who have stayed behind push past Mrs. Preutzmann. They reach their arms into the opening. With effort, they pull the limp form through, bumping her on the sharp edges of the bricks. The corpse is shunted up the steps by the last of the women. All have gone now except Lottie, the landlady, and her husband. No one knows how long it will be until this building too is ablaze. Lottie thinks it’s on fire right now. The basement was empty when they broke through; that’s not a good sign. They must get out, all of them, immediately.

The wife shouts again, ”Hans! Come!”

Lottie shoves her head into the cavity.

“My cello! Please! Mr. Preutzmann!”

The landlord whirls for the hard shell case. He rams it into the hole. But the bottom of the case is too broad. It jams and will not come through.

Lottie gasps.

The landlady points at her husband. “Leave the damn thing! Hans!”

Lottie watches though the hole. The basement behind the landlord fills with dripping fire. Flaming floorboards break and dangle, they loll like burning tongues. The inferno on the fallen staircase is in full bloom. The big man sets the Galiano on the floor. He takes up the pick, yelling, “Get back!”

Mr. Preutzmann winds up and takes a swing. His strength has returned. More bits of brick ricochet and scatter. The hole needs only to be enlarged a few inches.

After a half-dozen blows, the landlord drops the tool. Lottie rushes forward while he wriggles her cello case through the cavity. She leaves crimson prints on its length, her hands flare gripping her cello as though the flames are in her flesh.

She looks through the hole. Mr. Preutzmann stands erect. His face is flushed. He’s satisfied, he’s done his job as landlord, and a man. He puffs his cheeks, as though to snuff out a candle.

His wife sticks her head in beside Lottie.

“Hans.”

Lottie senses a rumble in the wall and floor. Her dread rises fast. She opens her lips to yell to Mr. Preutzmann but her mouth is stopped by a gigantic and invisible hand swatting her and the landlady backward from the hole. Their feet lift from the shaking floor, a gale of furious, scalding wind flings them backward across the room, unleashed by the collapsing building. Lottie clings to the cello in the dusty air on the cusp of the blast.

Blinking, Lottie sits up. Her eyes are baked dry in their sockets. The back of her head will have a lump. Her cello is beside her. Mrs. Preutzmann has been blown to the other side of the room and sprawls moaning in a thicket of debris, a new widow. Wood and twisted metal fill the hole, sticking out of it like broken bones.

Lottie is stunned. Every part of her sears. She has cuts on her legs and arms. She wobbles to her feet. She lifts her cello. The ground looks very far off; she seems to stand on top of some tall mound, a pyramid of events molded out of the last several terrible seconds, stacked so high under her she is dizzied. She does not shake her head to clear her mind. She wants to stay muddled right now, swaddled in the bafflement. There’s too much.

Lottie is blank.

One notion only.

Get out.

She hesitates to take a step, afraid she will tumble from the peak. She might not get up if that happens. She stumbles to Mrs. Preutzmann.

Must get out.

Teetering over the prone landlady, Lottie does not know what to do to wake the woman. She appears to be a long way down. In these seconds another single thought bubbles up through the miasma. It floats beside her, outside her. She doesn’t want the thought, doesn’t want to be sensate. But she cannot chase it away, she can’t hide from it on the blurred mountain of events. Lottie closes her eyes. She feels herself swaying. The thought enters her.

That was the last of it.

The last of it.

~ * ~

February 5, 1945,
1
:30
p.m.

The Hürtgen Forest, near the Belgian border

Germany

the driver asks, “sir?”

Bandy looks at the corporal behind the wheel of the jeep. He’s been bumping along with this assigned courier for fifteen minutes out of Aachen and the lad hasn’t said a word until now. Bandy likes this. It’s a country way. You don’t always have to be flapping off about something.

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’”

The boy, rawboned and freckled, speaks without taking his eyes from the rutted mud road. The steering wheel jumps a lot in his thin hands. His knuckles are pink. His knees are up almost to his chest, he’s tall.

“They told me you was a captain.”

“I am and I’m not. All civilian war photographers get that rank. But it doesn’t mean anything. Just unless we’re captured. Then all of a sudden we’re officers.”

Bandy sees in profile the boy smiling. “That sounds dumb, don’t it?”

Bandy agrees. “FUBAR.”

The jeep tires cut hard to the left in the muck. The soldier, maybe nineteen, fights the wheel, straightens the car. Bandy resists the urge to drive, but the boy is serious, he’s doing his best.

“Are you
the
Charles Bandy?”

Bandy grins. He has no advantage with a camera over other photographers. If there’s action in front of you, you snap it. You send the film through the censors to the photo pool, then it goes home. You hope it gets in print. All of them out here in Europe and in the Pacific have the same crapshoot. Bandy has just one edge on the competition. His name. And the title behind it,
life special correspondent.
He’s famous.

“Yes, I reckon I am. And you are?”

The boy hesitates. He steals a quick glimpse at his passenger.

“You interviewing me?”

“I just take pictures, son. No, I’m not interviewing you.”

The soldier nods. “Stewie.”The boy waits until he reaches a smooth enough plot in the road to handle the steering wheel with one mitt. He flashes the free hand to Bandy for a quick shake. “Stewie Stewart. Pleased.”

“Same, Stewie. Where you from?”

“California. Outside Stockton.”

“Cattle?”

“Horses. Quarter horses.”

“You play ball? You look like you did.”

“Yeah. You can tell, huh? In high school. You?”

“Naw.”

Most of the snow has melted along this ridge, leaving the trail soupy. The road approaches a sharp turn along the lip of a gorge. The tendons in Stewie’s wrists work like guy wires behind his fingers. The conversation drops. In the heavy woods below Bandy’s shoulder in the open jeep, an abandoned tank and a few trucks are spilled on their sides. They did not negotiate these slippery curves. Bandy pulls his camera bag into his lap, in the event that Stewie doesn’t either and he has to jump.

Bandy says nothing. He could reanimate the talk, share what he knows about horses and basketball, which isn’t much. He could be famous for tall, skinny, far-from-home Stewie Stewart, give him something to write his folks about. The corporal seems like a nice kid. But Bandy decides to leave it. Stewie’s a soldier, yes, but not a combatant. Bandy doesn’t want to hear about Stockton.

All around him is the dreaded Hürtgen, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire war. It’s good that Stewie has taken the cue and stayed quiet again, for Bandy plays God in his head and brings the battle alive. He watches ghost soldiers run and dive, hears trees explode, aims his mind’s camera into the recent past. From September to December of last year, Hodges’ First Army tried to penetrate the Hürtgen Forest to reach the Roer River running down its eastern edge. This is the thickest wood Bandy can imagine. Not in Tennessee or the North Carolina Smokies is there a forest like this. The fir trees are dense with low branches. A man couldn’t walk upright among them. Even on a bright day like today, the sun never touches the forest floor, so it stays dark and damp, with no covering underbrush. It’s a forest out of a scary fairy tale. And through the heart of it, like a black knight, runs the stolid Siegfried Line. The Hürtgen is the worst place Bandy has ever seen for a man to go if someone is waiting in there to kill him.

Why did the generals want to take on the Germans in here?

The Roer River. It’s the last natural barrier before the Rhine. First Army had the task of capturing the dams on the Roer, to stop the Germans from blowing them and flooding the Ruhr valley. With the dams safe, the river could be crossed quickly But if the Germans kept the dams, they’d be able to flood the valley and the Allied advance would be halted until the waters receded. That would give the enemy more time to prepare for the final onslaught, and cost more Allied lives.

The journalists have all heard the grumblings. In September, First Army could have assaulted the Roer dams from the south. The Hürtgen could have been bypassed. The forest without the dams is useless. The dams without the forest should have been the goal. But the generals wanted the Hürtgen cleared of enemy before they headed for the Roer. The forest would be in the rear of Montgomery’s precious northern thrust to Berlin. So they went in.

And the Hürtgen chewed up men. First Army crept in there and came limping out, gut shot. In ninety days of fighting the casualty rate was extraordinary, almost twenty-five thousand battle losses. Whole divisions were decimated. The Americans got a bad and bloody reversal.

Now, two months later, the Germans have retreated out of the Hürtgen. They still hold the dams. The current plan is for First Army to advance again through the forest, as well as through a corridor in the southeast. They’ll breach the Siegfried Line and attack the dams. Once they’ve been captured, Ninth Army and Montgomery’s British and Canadian forces can cross the Roer and close to the Rhine, protecting each other’s flanks. Beyond the Rhine there’s nothing but flatland and villages all the way to the Elbe River and on to Berlin. The race for the German capital gets back on track.

Stewie wrestles the jeep down the slope. He avoids the precarious ledge. More overturned vehicles litter the woods below. Tanks, tank destroyers, trucks, not all of them slipped off the road. Some have gaping holes in their sides, some have charred battle scars. Near the bottom of the canyon, many of the conifers have been snapped in half, as though lightning struck. Many more trees have their tops missing. Artillery blasts in these woods would have turned standing timber into a zipping hail of razor blades. A man could get cut to ribbons by flying wood.

How do you fight in there? No visibility through the crowds of firs. Tangled dark terrain. You’re facing an enemy on his own turf, who’s had ten years to dig in.

Stewie guides the jeep around the foot of the hill. In a glen ahead, Bandy gets his first look at the Siegfried Line. He tells Stewie to pull over. He scrambles in his pack for his 35mm Leica to take some shots of the dragon’s teeth.

The Germans have withdrawn from this section of the Line. Even empty, it’s forbidding. The dragon’s teeth protrude from a concrete mat thirty yards wide. The teeth are pyramids of reinforced concrete three feet high in the front, rising to twice that height toward the rear. They’re staggered in such a way that a tank couldn’t drive through them without getting stuck or tipping. Bandy can tell from busted spots that the mat itself is up to six feet thick. Concertina wire runs across all the gaps. An American sign has been posted in front of the barriers warning of trip wires and antitank mines. Placed as bookends are two massive concrete pillboxes, located to give the Germans interlocking fields of fire. Both are darkened to blend with the forest. Spread everywhere are gun pits, foxholes, bunkers, redoubts for artillery pieces. Seventy-five meters back through the trees, Bandy views another line of teeth, pillboxes, and fortifications just as forbidding.