Читать книгу The High White Forest - Ralph Allen - Страница 3

Table of Contents

The attack was not to begin for another seven hours and twenty-three minutes, but already the last of the medium guns were coming into position on the slopes and in the clearings and the first of the tanks were creeping out of the heavy, dark, snow-burdened woods to start forming up their columns. Although a heavy mist lay close to the narrow roadways and the thick pines and firs drew it in like blotting paper, a partial blackout was being enforced. There was no danger of air observation and from the foremost tip of the foremost panzer to the foremost American outpost the distance was believed to be at least seven kilometers, but it was important to establish a pattern of discipline at the outset. Smoking was permitted and officers were allowed to use hand flashlights to confer this final time over their map cases, but none of the vehicles, not even the tortured and sorely laboring artillery tractors and panzers, used headlights. Occasionally, fighting and snarling and clawing its way through a muddy cut-up ditch, one of the panzers flung a trail of angry sparks from its exhaust, and then, drawn in briefly from the fog and the dark edge of the woods, the half-faces of two, three, or a dozen of the quarter of a million waiting soldiers became half visible, like wicked woodcutters or honest charcoal burners or lost children staring out of one of the night forests of the Brothers Grimm.

SS Hauptscharführer Franz Koerner had brought his jeep into place, as scheduled and in good order, at the rear of the Sixth Panzer Army’s main column. “You can get out and stretch now if you like,” he said in English. “But don’t go far away. I’ve got a hunch we might move up a mile or so more before the jump-off.” It sounded all right to him; a lot better after five years than it might have been.

Unteroffizier Tannenbaum, sitting in the other front seat, beside him, rotated some of the stiffness out of his shoulders. “It’s drier here,” he said, also in English.

“Drier here what?” Hauptscharführer Koerner asked quickly.

“Drier here Captain,” Tannenbaum answered with a trace of weary patience.

“Or drier here sir,” the Hauptscharführer reminded him relentlessly. “And don’t you damned well forget it.”

“Yes, Cap’n-boss, sah. Ah sho’ ’nuff reads y’all loud en’ cleah. Oui, mon capitaine. Jawohl, mein Hauptsturm—”

“Sergeant Foster!” Franz would have liked to laugh, just for the hell of laughing again; Erich was forever almost making him laugh and he was forever having to check himself. He made his voice hard and menacing; in deference to the tacit understanding that had grown between them during the last seven weeks the Unteroffizier straightened in his seat and spoke now with full military solemnity.

“Sir?”

“What’s your first name, Sergeant?”

“Roger, sir. Full name Roger Harding Foster.”

“Serial number? Quick now.”

“One one eight nine six four four seven.”

“That’s up in the eleven millions. Let me see your dog tag.” Franz paused a few seconds. “You sure got in late, didn’t you, Sergeant? Where’d they find you? In the canebrakes?”

“Look soldier, I don’t have to take—”

“What’s your home town?” Franz snapped.

“Philly.”

“Where’s Independence Hall?”

“Sixth and Chestnut.”

“Who’s your most famous citizen?”

“I guess you’d have to say old Connie Mack.”

“What’s your outfit?”

“Artillery Observation, Forty-Second Infantry Division. Attached to First Battalion, Nine Twelve Regiment.”

“Whose artillery do you expect to observe back here? Don’t you know you’re thirty miles behind the front?”

“I got news for you, soldier. I’m two thousand yards behind the front and so are you. Half an hour from now the front will be right here. They’ve overrun everything up there. There’s a general order to retreat. Our regiment’s wiped out. The last order we got was every man for himself.”

“Come on, come on.” Hauptscharführer Koerner half scolded and half coaxed. “You’re supposed to be scared shitless at this point.”

“Quite.” Unteroffizier Tannenbaum, alias Sergeant Foster, slumped down in the seat again, thrust his hands into the pockets of his GI combat jacket, and lapsed defiantly into the mildly sardonic tone he had been using when the conversation began. “Quite. The funny thing is that if we do get to that point, I will be scared shitless.” Then he said in German, though the use of German was now explicitly forbidden, “Look, Franz, I can’t promise much. But I won’t forget my lines. I promise that.”

“Well, that’s something.” Franz spoke in German also. He could not see the round, intelligent cynical face of his companion, but it warmed him strangely to think that a flicker of unaffected anxiety must have crossed it just now; the whisper of the confessional was clearly audible in Tannebaum’s voice.

“How about you, Corporal Christiansen? Do you want to stretch?”

The perfectly disciplined voice of SS Rottenführer Lemmering responded at once from the seat directly behind. “I think I’ll just stay here a while, sir.”

“PFC Lachaise?”

“He’s asleep, sir,” Rottenführer Lemmering said, disposing only momentarily of that particular problem. It was hard enough to think of Grenadier Gotthold Preysing being mistaken for anyone in the world but Grenadier Gotthold Preysing of Hamburg; the weird lottery that had designated him as PFC Henri Lachaise of New Orleans and wiped away the last trace of an excuse for his incurable Gotthold Preysingness was like piling one impossible accident on another. When Preysing, with innocent pride, had displayed the dog tag in the barracks at Grafenwöhr, Hauptscharführer Koerner had stridden to the orderly room to see what could be done. “Sir,” he had tried to explain to the busy Wehrmacht major in charge of documentation and orientation, “if we could just find a Germanic name for Grenadier Preysing. Or at least an Anglo-Saxon one. There are lots of German accents in America. Where I come from sir, in Yorkville—”

“I don’t care where you come from, Hauptscharführer.” The Wehrmacht rarely had so rich a chance to pull rank on the SS. “I’m busy with more important matters and can do nothing.”

“Jawohl, Herr Major.” Franz’s impeccably correct salute admitted defeat.

But the problem of Grenadier Gotthold Preysing, the putative PFC Lachaise, could not be dismissed so simply. At that stage, before they had even heard the code words Operation Greif and Operation Einheit Stielau, the only two things they knew for certain were that they were to function as a four-man unit with Hauptscharführer Koerner in charge, that they would be using American weapons and American vehicles, that they would in due course be issued American uniforms, and that they had only a very short time to bone up on or learn the American language as spoken by the American GI. The strongest rumor, and the one that gained the easiest passage through their sealed and closely guarded assembly camp, was that they were to be part of a swift-striking fifth column whose assignment, no more, no less, was to dash into Paris, seize General Eisenhower himself, and spirit him back through the American lines to Berlin. That this was feasible no one doubted. Was not their commandant the great Oberst Otto Skorzeny, to whom nothing was impossible? Was it not Skorzeny who, at the Führer’s personal order, had dropped with a handful of men on an Italian mountaintop and snatched Mussolini from his captors of the Carbinieri? Was it not Skorzeny who had swooped into Budapest to kidnap the son of the wavering Regent of Hungary? Was it not Skorzeny who, as much as any other man, had snuffed out the treasonable plot of July 20 against the Führer’s life?

Watching Skorzeny stride across the parade square, long, lean, and bursting with blond Nordic energy, Unteroffizier Tannenbaum turned his round face from the window of their barracks room. For once the perpetual little curve was gone from the corner of his mouth; for once he did not seem too wise for his twenty-three years; for once his manner was as boyish and eager as it should have been.

He and Franz were in the little hut alone; they could, provided Franz didn’t object, pretend that they were back in real life again, that they were fellow-sergeants respectively of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, and that there was no need for the time being to go on play-acting at something else.

“Look at the big bastard!” Tannenbaum invited admiringly. “Whatever it’s going to be it’s no wonder they’ve called it Operation Greif.” They were talking English for practice, even though the order to talk nothing else had not yet come down. “The son-of-a-bitch looks like a greif.”

“What’s a greif?” Franz was a little envious of Tannenbaum’s unflagging erudition and seldom encouraged him to display it. But he was genuinely curious.

“I guess the English word would be griffin. Half lion and half eagle. Well, I’ll be damned!” he exploded. “Of course it’s Paris. What a fool! It’s been staring us in the face right from the start.”

“What do you mean?”

“You remember Paradise Lost, of course?” The wise little curve had reappeared and Franz knew he was about to be needled, gently and with mild affection, but still needled.

“Of course I remember Paradise Lost,” Franz said, feeling for once he was getting just a shade the best of it. “Back at dear old Winchester they wouldn’t give us our crumpets until we recited the whole God-damned thing backward.”

The trouble was that Tannenbaum had been at Winchester, for six years, and then at Oxford for two before his father packed up along with the rest of the German Embassy in London. He knew something about everything. He’d even studied theater, and when he remembered he was perfectly capable of transferring his donnish accent to any known region from Yorkshire to Alabama. It was unlikely, Franz had decided, that he’d be worth a damn as a soldier, but if he did turn out to be a soldier he’d be a magnificent asset on a mission like this, no matter where the mission might lead them.

“Of course it’s Paris!” Tannenbaum refused to allow his excitement to be dampened. “This Skorzeny is the greatest military ham since Hannibal. I’ll bet right now he’s gnashing his teeth to think that Hannibal beat him to the elephants. He’s also supposed to be an intellectual. You can bet the griffin was his idea and you can bet he was thinking of Milton. Listen! Paradise Lost! Part Two!” Unteroffizier Erich Tannenbaum flung his arm wide, commanding silence.

“As when a gryphon thro’ the wilderness,

With wingèd course, o’er hill or moory dale,

Pursues the Arimaspian, who, by stealth,

Had from his wakeful custody purloined

The guarded gold.”

“Get it, Franz?” Erich’s eyes were fairly prancing now.

“No.” Franz was back on the defensive, where Erich always forced him when they got away from soldiering.

“Well, you do get the business about the gryphon—the greif, that’s us and the Oberst—pursuing with wingèd course o’er hill or moory dale?”

“Go on, Professor.”

“The Arimaspian! There’s the rest of your key! You know who the Arimaspian is?”

Franz refused to be drawn into any further admissions.

“It’s Eisenhower!” Erich shouted. “That’s who the Arimaspian is. It’s Eisenhower. How could I have missed it!”

“And why is it Eisenhower?” Franz could not avoid one last question, but he made it easier by edging it with his heaviest sarcasm.

“The Arimaspians were the people who used to raid the griffins’ gold mines, just to make wreaths and garlands for their hair. What are the bloody Yanks doing, what’s Ike doing but raiding Germany, raiding all Europe, grabbing its gold for a crown of glory?”

“Ike’s got no hair to put it in,” Franz pointed out. Nevertheless he was impressed.

Tannenbaum had already rushed on past him. He was striding up and down between the bunks.

“I wouldn’t be Eisenhower for all the tea in China. Here we go, through the wilderness, o’er hill or moory dale. Allons, les enfants de la pa-ha-trie, lala lala tum-tum-tum TUM.” He stopped in mid-flight. “You’ve been to Paree?”

“No,” Franz said. “They chased my outfit right on past.”

“Ah, yes,” Erich said sympathetically. “You are of the fighting forces. An enviable distinction. For my part I was forced after the blitz and conquest of France to spend almost two years in Paris. They exiled me to a demeaning existence as chief steward of an officers’ club on the Rue des Italiens. There were of course compensations. In return for certain unscheduled favors to certain high-ranking officers I was able to obtain fairly frequent leaves to Berlin. And of course the rations, even when I was confined to the veritable hell of Paris, were at least bearable. Yes, one might say very bearable.”

Franz listened with growing interest. “Then of course, if one was fortunate one might find companions—though not always, regrettably, of the highest moral character. There was a girl named Yvette. While you and the Herr Oberst and the others are putting the snatch on General Eisenhower, I might just—but no. No, I guess that would be impractical.”

Franz lay back on his bunk. In the SS you didn’t make jokes about military affairs, even obliquely. You seldom felt the desire to, for the SS was an iron inner priesthood within the larger priesthood of the Reich. Still, a break from habit was sometimes a good thing in itself and there couldn’t be any real harm in listening awhile longer to this bubbling, unabashed, and outrageously, illogically likable young scoundrel from the soft and bumbling Wehrmacht.

“I find myself, like old Kaspar in the sun, groping for ancient memories,” Erich went on lyrically. “It seems to come to me faintly, as though from a great distance, that there was also a girl in Berlin. A girl in Berlin named Else. Ah yes, it becomes more distinct by the moment.”

Franz threw him a cigarette. Tannenbaum fielded it expertly in mid-air and put a lighter to it without losing more than a breath or two. “Now that the details come back I remember it as a most practical arrangement. My girl in Paris supplied me with perfume and silk, which I took to my girl in Berlin; my girl in Berlin supplied me with Bratwurst and goose liver, which I took to my girl in Paris. I would not have dreamed such days could come back so soon.”

“Weren’t the girls jealous?”

“Indescribably. Ferociously. That is why I did not trouble their pretty heads with an excess of needless information.”

“And tell me.” In spite of himself Franz entered the spirit of jovial irony. “During all this international trade in love and goose liver and Bratwurst and perfume did no money change hands?”

“Providence, as I have indicated, does provide certain compensations,” Tannenbaum admitted. “There was usually a little money for Yvette in Paris and a little for Else in Berlin and sometimes, God willing, a bit left over for me. Quite a bit when I was able to squeeze a few cigarettes into the equation.”

“In other words,” Franz said, ashamed to be discussing so monstrous a matter so casually, but still half spellbound, “you were working the black market.”

Tannenbaum sprang to attention. “Herr Hauptscharführer, if you will repeat that remark on our return to Heidelberg, you may expect a call from my friend Prince Scharnhorststauffel. In the meantime the answer is yes. Ah, Paris! Allons les enfants de la—”

“God! What a cynic!”

“Au contraire, mein lieber freund. Just the opposite. I am a fanatical and devoted idealist.” He sprang to attention again and raised his arm in salute. “Heil Yvette! Heil Else!”

Franz was almost stunned. “Cut that out!” he shouted. But the black rage he should have felt sputtered out in semispeechless shock. “If they catch you at that—if anybody else catches you at anything like that—kaput! curtains!”

“Alas, how true, mein lieber freund. If anybody catches me at anything the result will be a most unhappy one. If the police catch me at the black market it’s assuredly curtains. If the Gestapo catches me displaying my deepest and most exalted feelings for Yvette and Else in the deepest and most exalted manner at my command, it is of a surety kaput! If the Schweinhund Englisch or the sales Americaines or the debased Canadians catch me in my incarnation as Sergeant Roger Harding Foster it is both curtains and kaput. And if, by any hideous misfortune Yvette should catch me with Else, or vice versa, it then would be not only curtains and kaput but zut! zut! zut!”

“Tell me one more thing,” Franz said, “before we get back to work. How in the name of God did a Kleinlich like you ever get into an outfit like this? You must have volunteered like the rest of us.”

“Ah,” Tannenbaum reflected, “yet another story, equally sad. You remember the wording of the appeal for volunteers?”

“Pretty well,” Franz said. “My company commander read it to me in private.”

“For my part,” Tannenbaum said, “I remember to the letter, as any man granted an advance look at it would remember his own epitaph. No, no, don’t take that literally. I fully intend to survive our forthcoming adventure, whatever it may be and wherever it may lead us. The epitaph I refer to applies not to the corporeal Unteroffizier Tannenbaum but to the part of him that is forever Yvette, forever Else, forever the fine ripe burgundies of the officers’ club on the Rue des Italiens. Do you have another cigarette to spare?”

He sat down on the bed across the narrow hut from Franz and swung his feet up from the floor until he was half reclining.

“I would perhaps never have heard of the call for volunteers except for what I must regard as the most disastrous single mistake of my entire military career. We, that is to say, the management of the officers’ club in Paris, had by now been driven all the way back to Paris along with the other, er, civilizing agencies of the Wehrmacht. However, my fighting spirit unimpaired, I had plunged back into the fray as chief steward of another officers’ club on one of those excellent little streets off the Kurfürstendamm. In view of the somewhat altered fortunes of war, it was not a bad little club at all. Better, let us be fair enough to concede”—Tannenbaum paused to regard their bare dormitory—“than this.”

“It was there,” he continued, “that I made my critical error. One quiet morning I allowed my ravishing Yvette to visit me there. My superior, a dreadful fat pig of an Oberleutnant, chanced upon us in the hallway and insisted on being introduced. The next thing I knew—it couldn’t have been more than a day or so afterward—there I was standing at attention while he read the message from headquarters. Remember, my dear Franz, up to then I had been indispensable to this swollen, comatose head of Blumenkohl. But here he was now, having filled his fat Blumenkohl head with sinful and illicit thoughts of my fair Yvette, plotting to get rid of me at once and altogether.”

Tannenbaum paused. “If you find this too painful, my dear Franz, pray stop me. I know you have an intense sense of justice and the rest of the story may be more than you can endure.”

“Go on,” Franz said.

“Well, there I was standing before this unspeakable Abzugskanal. As I have said, every syllable is burned eternally on my soul. ‘One,’ the fat pail of Abfall read, ‘The Führer has ordered the formation of a special unit of a strength of about two battalions for employment in reconnaissance and special tasks on the Western Front. The personnel will be assembled from volunteers of all arms of the Army and Waffen SS, who must fulfill the following requirements:

“ ‘“A.,” ’ the bloated tub of Eingeweide read on, ‘ “physically A-1, suitable for special tasks, mentally keen, strong personality.

“ ‘“Paragraph,” ’ the indescribable Entsetzen continued, ‘ “B. Fully trained in single combat.

“ ‘“Paragraph,” ’ the obscene Geschwulst concluded. ‘ “C.” ’ Knowledge of the English language and also the American dialect.” ’”

Tannenbaum paused again. “Then this decaying Venusmuschel peered at me out of his crafty little eyes and said, ‘I shall not, of course, stand in your way, Unteroffizier Tannenbaum.’ I tried vainly to explain that although I did, indeed, have a knowledge of the English language, my knowledge of the American dialect ended with the last Hollywood pictures of 1941. The grinning Ungeheuer said a man of my intelligence would have no difficulty in bringing myself up to date. Then I hinted that I was not only not fully trained in single combat but that I was not trained in single combat in any manner or degree whatsoever. ‘There will no doubt be facilities,’ the mound of Teig assured me. ‘And there is no question that you are mentally keen. As for your strong personality—well, we hardly need to go into that, do we?’ The loathsome Spinne had the nerve to laugh out loud, thinking out loud of my lovely Yvette.

“I saw, however, that I was defeated. I decided at least to give the monstrous Kröte something to think about. ‘That leaves only the question of physical fitness, doesn’t it, Herr Oberleutnant?’ I asked.

“ ‘That’s the general idea,’ he said, grinning evilly.

“ ‘I regularly run a thousand kilometers in three minutes and chin myself a hundred times without missing a breath,’ I said, fixing him with a dignified and manly stare. ‘There’s not a gram of fat on my entire body,’ I added for good measure. The overstuffed Klumpen did not even have the decency to blush. And that, my dear Franz, is how you find me foursquare at your side, a fellow volunteer in Operation Greif.”

“You know.” Franz got to his feet after a few moments’ silent contemplation. He stood before the Unteroffizier, half a head taller, visibly leaner and harder. In spite of the ease with which Tannenbaum had dominated the conversation there was not the slightest doubt of who was in command, in fact as well as in rank. “You know, there’s only one thing that encourages me about you, Erich. I think even your phoniness is a little phony. I think you may be all right, or anyway you’ll do your best to be all right. If I had any real doubt you know, of course, I’d turn you in. If I thought you meant real disrespect to the Führer, if I thought your attitude to this coming job was as impossible as you make it sound—”

“You’d turn me in.”

“All the way in,” Franz said evenly. “All the way in to the Gestapo, Erich. You shouldn’t have forgotten I’m a member of the Schutzstaffel. I shouldn’t have forgotten either.”

“Well,” Erich said, solemn for the first time, not visibly frightened but wholly solemn nevertheless, “since you’ve been frank with me, I’ll be frank with you. I’m not a traitor and I don’t intend to become one. If I have to give this war my blood, I’ll do so; I won’t give it my reverence.” He looked straight up into Franz’s still-appraising blue eyes. “I told you my father was in the diplomatic service. I didn’t tell you he was killed just before I reported here.”

Franz started to murmur something.

“No, no. Please. There was nothing heroic about it. A bomb jettisoned on one of the safe suburbs; naturally my father had found a safe suburb as soon as they called him back from England. He’s only worth a little mourning; I can provide that myself and still have plenty left for later uses.”

Franz stirred uneasily. “My father was of the Junker class,” Tannenbaum went on. “He had a good record in the first war. As a staff officer, of course. Nothing so grubby or dangerous as this. Naturally he was against the Führer from the outset, considered him a hideous, vulgar little upstart. Now sit still, Franz. I’m not going to subject you to another display of sedition. The fact is I always considered the Führer right and necessary for Germany. I still do.”

“I’m sure the Führer would be relieved,” Franz said coldly. “Then we don’t have to go any further, do we?”

“Please let me finish, Franz. It’s important to me, at least, that you tolerate my eccentricities, and you can’t tolerate them unless you understand them.”

“I find it growing harder to do either.” Franz still kept his voice firm and distant.

“My father joined the National Socialist party in 1934 and had a safe and moderately successful career in its service until that purely accidental bomb hit him late last month. In 1933 my father was a proud and charming man, full of sparkling lively talk, bursting with ideas, and incidentally the best fly fisherman I ever saw. In 1943 he was nothing, less than nothing. He spoke in nothing but party clichés; since the Reichstag fire he made a career of fawning on his natural enemies and betraying his lifelong friends.”

“Perhaps he was merely doing his duty.” Franz was vaguely aware that this was a party cliché too. He was also aware that clichés weren’t necessarily untrue.

“Terror has broken better men than my father,” Tannenbaum reflected forlornly. “But what a cruel joke to make the bargain of Faust and then have the devil go back on his end of it. My father was so afraid of death that he allowed his life to lose all meaning and then he lost that, too.”

“That’s a tragedy,” Franz said shortly. “Wars are full of tragedy.”

“Granted,” Tannenbaum said more cheerfully. “I merely wanted to explain why, although I’m more or less resigned to fighting this one, I can’t pay homage to it.”

“Just watch it from now on.” Franz was friendly again. “We’ll both be better off that way.”

Tannenbaum, his spirits apparently restored in full, began whistling “Auprès de ma blonde.”

“What are we going to do about Gotthold Preysing?” Franz was now wholly businesslike.

“What indeed?” Tannenbaum whistled a bar or two of the song.

“Don’t forget you’re deputy leader of this detachment,” Franz reminded him. “If anything happens to me you take charge. What are we going to do about Gotthold Preysing?”

“Treat him as a shellshock case,” Tannenbaum counseled. “If anybody intercepts us, tell Gotthold just to roll his eyes and start gibbering.”

“I don’t know whether you’re serious or not. It’s a damned serious matter. We may really be in Paris capturing Eisenhower. Or God knows where else doing what. If we’re stopped I can get by. So can you if you’ll quit trying to be so God-damned clever. Lemmering’s accent isn’t perfect but with a cover name like Christianson he can pass for a Danish-American. But Preysing with the cover name of Henri Lachaise—”

A shadow passed over Franz’s lean, tough, wind-burned face. Tannenbaum spoke in alarm. “Look, Franz! He’ll be all right. You’re not thinking—”

Franz looked at him without expression and spoke in the stiff careful language of an SS marching order.

“Nothing that can be prevented will be allowed to jeopardize our mission.”

“He’s such a nice little bastard.” Tannenbaum was on the edge but not quite across the edge of desperate earnestness, as though desiring to plead something but half afraid to plead, lest in doing so he magnify the danger he was pleading against.

“Where the hell did he get what he thinks is his English?” Franz was no more willing than Erich to spell out the harder, ultimate question.

“You’ve never really talked to him, have you, Franz?”

“I’d like to, but he seems scared of me.”

“Well, he is. He’s scared of both you and Lemmering. He’s heard so many stories about the SS. I guess that’s why he talks to me so much. He shows me pictures of his family—two plump little buck-toothed daughters, one son old enough to be in the Luftwaffe.”

“How did the Army let him in for this?”

“The poor little guy fought his way in. He was an interpreter for Cunard in Bremen for nearly fifteen years. That’s where he got most of his English, the rest came from school. He never had any complaints about it before.”

“Gotthold would be perfect,” Franz conceded sourly, “if we were running steamship excursions to New York. But I doubt if that’s what Oberst Skorzeny has in mind.”

“Anyway, Gotthold, unlike me, is a one-thousand-per-cent, dyed-in-the-wool, honest-to-God volunteer.” Tannenbaum went on. “Originally he was in one of the stomach divisions. Leaving the state of his innards aside, just being in a stomach division was like being in hell. Poor Gotthold wants to be a hero even worse than I don’t. Well, the diet helped his ulcer quite a bit and between that and the shortage of reinforcements he got transferred a couple of months ago from the stomach division to a Volksgrenadier division. They used him there on PW interrogation. His Cunard-line English was fine for that and he got quite a reputation for it. So when Greif came up they told him about it; naturally he leaped at the chance. Who can guess how he got through the final screening here? Somebody must have been drunk.”

“But what do we do with him?” Franz repeated stonily. “They won’t let me replace him. If we could even get him another name, another identification tag, if we could make him a Cincinnati Dutchman named Schultz—but my God, Henri Lachaise!”

“Look, Franz, don’t give up on him yet,” Tannenbaum said quickly. “Let me see what I can do. He keeps showing me those God-damned pictures of his wife and kids and then hinting that we Wehrmacht men must stick together or you SS bastards will throw us to the wolves and—”

“All right,” Franz cut in curtly. “Do what you can with him. But remember what I said. Preysing starts out with us, I have no control over that. But nothing I can prevent will jeopardize our mission. Nothing, Sergeant Foster. Nothing at all.”

Franz still had a last-minute hope that they’d weed Gotthold Preysing out in the daily classes of English instruction and review. But the officer in charge, a former language professor from Westphalia, had a schoolmaster’s ear for words and no ear at all for sounds. He asked Grenadier Preysing one question only.

“State your rank and name.”

“Brivate Virsst Klass La Dgjass, Ennrig,” Gotthold replied.

“Jawohl,” the professor said absently. “Not bad. A little too hard on the consonants. Practice in your barracks room the consonants. Next man. State your rank and name.”

The professor yielded to the professor’s old temptation to lean on his star pupils, and Gotthold was called on for no further performances in public. When Oberst Skorzeny or one of the other senior officers dropped in to see how things were going, the professor focused the drill on Franz or Erich or on the former merchant seaman from Baltimore, the former mechanic from Montreal, the former bus boy from Cincinnati, and the dozen other pupils whose English had not come solely from books and classrooms.

“Achtung!” the professor would shout, bringing them to their feet.

“Kommando zurück,” the visiting officer would order companionably. As the class sat down again, the professor would ask, “Shall we proceed, Herr Oberst?”

“By all means, and you might as well call me Colonel.”

“Yes, sir.” The professor would pretend to survey the class at random and then he’d point, perhaps, toward Erich. “That man in the third row, translate the two commands you have just heard and acted on.”

Erich would be on his feet, poker-faced. “Achtung: Attention. Kommando zurück: As you were.”

“Good. What is Weitermachen?”

“Carry on.”

“Gewehr ab!”

“Order arms!”

“Weggetreten!”

“Dismissed!”

“Stahlhelm?”

“Helmet.”

“You may sit down. Now we try some military slang. German slang into American slang. We place great stress on this part of the course,” the professor would explain to the visiting officer, trying to suppress a beam of self-satisfaction. “Ah, let me see. We’ll try the man over there at the left of the second row.” This would probably be Franz or the bus boy from Cincinnati.

“Horchkussus maken?”

“Hit the sack.”

“Arschloch?”

“Bloody fool.”

“Frikandellenfriedhof?”

“Belly.”

“Wuhling?”

“Snafu. Foul-up.”

“Getrankeobervormann?”

“Lush. Drunk. Soak.”

“Good.” The professor might turn to the officer again, smiling with a fellow-officer’s delicacy. “Do you mind, sir, if we—er—”

“No. No. I’ve had a certain amount of experience, Major.”

“The man on the aisle in the fourth row. Blech?”

“Balls.”

“Scheisse?”

“Crap.”

“Puff?”

“Cat-house.”

“Pinkeln?”

“Piss.”

Most of their time on parade was spent on heavy PT, in practicing maintenance on their jeep, and in dismantling, reassembling, and firing their American small arms. Franz was issued a Tommy gun and Erich and the other two members of their squad with M-1 rifles. In addition Franz was given a complete set of millimeter-to-the-kilometer maps of the entire Western front from Arnhem on the north to Colmar on the south. “I don’t know our sector yet myself,” the Sturmbanführer who handed them out said. “When they tell us they’ll give us other maps. In the meantime study these carefully.”

They were, of course, confined to their heavily guarded barracks area and weren’t allowed to send mail out. Sometimes there was a moving picture in the recreation hall and on one improbable Saturday night the wet canteen struck a swift, brief gusher of Löwenbrau (whether it was wholly genuine, pre-1942, pre-Stalingrad, pre-Alamein, pre-Pearl Harbor, pre-Second Front Löwenbrau was a subject of much debate; the young soldiers had never known real Löwenbrau and the old soldiers were no longer sure they could trust their memories). Most evenings the four men lounged around their little squad room in a state of domestic informality. The wood stove—for the first time in months there seemed to be no shortage of either fuel or rations—glowed reassuringly between the two double-tiered bunks. Rottenführer Lemmering, who had once worked in the Ford assembly plant at River Rouge, Michigan, spent hours studying the manual on the jeep and breaking down, cleaning, and oiling the Tommy gun and the M-1s. Franz studied his maps. The Eisenhower rumor fitted the maps and the mysterious preparations as well as any of the other rumors fitted. Franz dismissed the one that said they were to make a dash for the Channel coast and liberate the German garrison imprisoned at Calais, nor could he make much of the one that insisted there was to be a full-scale multiarmy drive for Antwerp to slice the Allied forces in two and cut off their best supply port. The first seemed to offer too small a prize, the second too impossible an effort. He was on the verge of agreeing with Erich that they were indeed making ready to pursue the Arimaspian.

While Franz proceeded with these private speculations, Unteroffizier Tannenbaum devoted most of his spare time to an equally doubtful project. Erich was making a desperate and oddly chivalrous attempt to get Gotthold Preysing ready for Der Tag. Preysing accepted his help reluctantly. Having been at first so full of cheerful complacency, he was now deep in gloom and self-mistrust; everybody made fun of his English, even the illiterate ex-convict from St. Louis who’d been discovered in the Todt labor organization and the suspected pansy who’d once been a clerk for American Express in Vienna.

“I don’t think we’re getting anywhere, Sergeant Foster.” Gotthold was at least growing accustomed to his own and the others’ noms de guerre.

“Of course we are, PFC Lachaise. Don’t forget, for all we know Der Tag may be still a month away, perhaps two months away. Now, just try to remember the three things. Watch my mouth when I form the words before you. Soft always on the consonants. Try to get the sound more through the nose and less from the throat.”

Gotthold kept glancing nervously toward Hauptscharführer Koerner, busy with the maps, and Rottenführer Lemmering, busy with the guns. Quite clearly his apprehensiveness was growing by the day. It added to his demoralization to have his weakness constantly on parade before the two frightening SS men. It could be sensed that he’d gladly have forefeited his fading dream of glory to be back in the puny sanctuary of the stomach battalion.

“Now, slowly,” Tannenbaum would coax him. “I say the German. You say the English. Ready?”

“Hchreddy.”

“First word. Now think carefully. Frass.”

“Jow?” Gotthold would venture hopefully.

“Chow. Try it again.”

“Jow.”

“That’s better. Flutterluke.”

“Mouth.”

“Perfect! Damn’ good work, PFC Lachaise. Angst.”

“Zgaredt.”

“Scared.” Tannenbaum was as gentle as a mother.

“Zgaredt.” By now Gotthold was usually sweating.

“Now here comes the big one again. Take your time, PFC Lachaise. Figgen.”

“Fock.”

“Not quite. Watch me while I say it and listen carefully.”

Then Gotthold would try again.

“Fugg.”

“Not quite. Listen again, PFC Lachaise.”

Gotthold would listen again, think again, bring a desperate frown to his desperately concentrated face and say carefully:

“Fogck.”

A knifelike sleet began driving in across the treetops. It smothered the farthest gusts and gleams of light, but closer in, where the troubled panzers threw orange sparks against the roadway and flashlights flickered on and off, the sleet acted as a lens and pulled the dark shapes in closer and made them twice as large as life. The noise had grown, swollen by a background chorus of half-shouted demands, orders, and questions. Where the guns and tanks and other vehicles had come to rest their crews began dismounting, taking what shelter they could from the sleet and stamping their feet, slapping their sides, and muttering therapeutic curses against the deepening cold.

Franz got out and walked a little way down the convoy. At a narrow crossroad an NCO of the Feldgendarmerie, trying without much success to control the local traffic, picked him up with a flashlight and ordered him to halt. The field policeman was not suspicious, merely curious. “So you’re one of the Yanks?” he said after Franz had answered his challenge. “They told us to watch out for you fellows. Is it true you’re going to be across the Meuse by nightfall?”

Franz hesitated. Everybody knew by now where the armies were headed, and the temptation to share the excitement with someone new was very strong. But you had to be careful with the Feldgendarmerie. They could be as dangerous as the Gestapo itself sometimes; for all he knew this was some childish security trap. “I’m not allowed to discuss those things, Gefreiter,” he said, and began walking back to the jeep.

Gotthold Preysing was still sound asleep on the back seat and the other two men were dozing too, huddled into their combat jackets with their helmets pulled down sidewise in the path of the driving sleet. Franz looked at his watch. Still more than an hour until midnight. Nearly six hours until the barrage began. If they went on sitting here like this they’d be half paralyzed by morning.

He manhandled Preysing awake and shook Tannenbaum and Lemmering erect.

“Out!” he said. “Start digging in.” He had never quite grown accustomed to giving apparently senseless orders without explaining them, but one thing he’d learned was that once you started explaining orders there was no end to it. That was one of the crucial differences between the Wehrmacht and the SS. The SS neither apologized for anything nor justified anything; even a lowly Rottenführer, passing down an order he didn’t understand himself to an even more lowly Sturmmann who didn’t understand it either, almost never violated the unwritten rule that every order explained itself, simply by reason of being an order. Franz’s men were capable of reasoning it out for themselves that they were better off digging useless trenches than sitting uselessly in the falling snow, growing more numb and useless by the minute.

He remembered the sense of outrage and anticlimax with which he himself had first heard the gospel of the shovel. This was on his very first day in the Army, more than a year before he had won his transfer to the SS. Because of the technicalities over his American citizenship—America was still neutral then—it had taken almost a year and a half before he was accepted. Amid the swift, sure triumphs of 1940, with Western Europe in collapse and Russia lying stupefied, awaiting the Führer’s pleasure, the Army could afford to be as choosy as it wanted. But soon afterward it was reaching out hungrily for every able-bodied man in sight. Franz hadn’t minded his job monitoring the BBC for the Foreign Ministry, and his boss kept assuring him that nothing he could do in uniform could possibly be of greater service to the Reich, but that wasn’t what he’d come for. When his call-up arrived at last he felt utterly sure that he had at last found his place in the grand design, not only of the Reich, but of the world and the universe.

Since then he had become accustomed to the physical realities of war and had made the much more difficult and shocking adjustment to its moral and philosophical disappointments. He still remembered his first lecture in his first training camp. He was then twenty-three, two years younger in time than he was now and perhaps forty years younger in experience, and he had fully expected his indoctrination to begin with a Wagenerian flourish of trumpets. But in this German lecture hall, as of August 1941 at any rate, they were doing things far less dramatically and with far less emotion than the Bund had done them even before the war began and even as far away as Camp Siegfried, Long Island, and Camp Nordland, New Jersey.

A very old Oberstleutnant strode in and ordered them at ease. He must have known that it was an entirely new draft and therefore an intensely keyed-up one. Most of them had been civilians not more than two days earlier, and only a few of them had as yet even drawn all their equipment. But without a single word of greeting or preamble the old officer launched into a long and immensely detailed dissertation on what he termed their most vital and previous single article of equipment. Was this the rifle? Was it the light machine gun? Was it the heavy machine gun? The grenade? The hard, killing bayonet? The mortar? Or was it perhaps something more abstract he was leading to; perhaps the sense of duty and of destiny, the sense of unity and faith between them and their new comrades. No. Indeed no. Nothing so fancy or poetic. Their most vital piece of equipment, the old Oberstleutnant was telling them, was the shovel. The shovel.

“An infantryman without a rifle is no soldier,” the weary old officer announced. “An infantryman without a shovel is a suicide. The shovel belongs to the modern infantryman as the horse to the rider or the bullet to the rifle.”

He went into a lengthy aside on the Hochloch and its uses. Momentarily confused, Franz found himself groping back toward his English. Hochloch? What was a Hochloch? He knew he ought to know and he looked around him uneasily, wondering if anybody in the room could guess he was sitting there grubbing around in the debris of his alien American youth. Foxhole! The context supplied the definition before he had time to feel really guilty; with a sense of relief he retransferred his thoughts to German.

“In modern war,” the Oberstleutnant had explained, “the infantryman does not have to build an intricate system of positions. He merely has to be able to build a Hochloch. He must be able to build it in any terrain, in any posture and at any time of day or night.”

Franz was older than most of the other recruits. He saw by their faces that they felt just as cheated and let down by this prosaic stuff as he did. They were all too green and timid to stir or cough, but the Oberstleutnant, perhaps because he had faced so many similar audiences before and had said precisely the same things to them and had seen them receive it with precisely the same expressions, sensed that their thoughts were wandering from the Hochlochen and called them back with a sharp and threatening: “Achtung!”

“The Hochloch,” he proceeded, “must be deep and narrow. Deep enough to provide full cover for the rifleman, yet enabling him at the same time, to find a proper aiming position; in addition narrow enough to provide protection for the rifleman against enemy tanks. The Hochloch must be large enough to afford room for two riflemen, for in combat two riflemen form a group. The Hochloch, therefore, has to be fifty by eighty centimeters in width and length and one meter deep. Whether its long or its short side should face the enemy depends on the terrain, the enemy situation and the assigned mission.”

When they scattered afterward to their billets, it was the consensus among the men of the new draft that this was just something someone on the General Staff had shoved into the training syllabus to keep old colonels on the payroll and young privates out of mischief. They’d surely pass this threadbare, 1917 ante-blitzkrieg nonsense down to the labor battalions, where it belonged, and start getting the fighting men ready for the fighting.

But the Oberstleutnant must have been a man of greater influence than it appeared, for the warnings he had given them all came true. “The training of the recruit in the use of the rifle and the shovel has to be given equal attention from the very first day,” he had announced. They began training in the use of the shovel on the very first day thereafter; they did not begin training with the rifle until the very eleventh day. “Young and old soldiers, of all grades, officers as well as enlisted men, must not allow a single day to pass without having practiced with the shovel,” the old officer persisted. Not a single day did pass without practice with the shovel, although the sweating young recruits agreed sourly that their preceptor must be doing his own daily practice on some private, hidden field reserved for officers. The Oberstleutnant took out a dog-eared manual and read from some even higher authority: “The use of the shovel at night, already neglected in daytime, is generally thought to be superfluous. This conclusion is wrong, for the night offers the soldier just the right opportunity to make himself invisible and invulnerable for the day.” They went on trenching exercises at night, crouching low under the pale autumn stars while underofficers lay listening a hundred yards away for telltale sounds and firing live tracer bullets two feet above the ground.

Franz was an expert with the shovel before he left his training camp; he did not become a convert until he left Normandy. He left Normandy through the Falaise gap with the last blackened, broken, stumbling remnants of the 12th SS Panzer, the young and undefilable division that had gone into battle bearing the proud name of the Hitler Jugend. The Hitler Jugend had survived in name at least, and now, having spent four months in reassembling and training its reinforcements, it was going back into battle somewhere in this very column. The Hitler Jugend, Franz had often told himself while he was helping to build it up again, had lived only because it refused to die. In his less romantic moments he also reminded himself that he, Franz Koerner, had lived because he had truly learned the holy writ of the shovel, because he had clung to his shovel as faithfully as he had clung to his rifle, clung to his shovel after his last bullet was gone, after his water was gone, after his rations were gone, after his helmet was lost, after one shoe was torn off by the concussion of a twenty-five-pounder and the other worn through to the naked, bleeding flesh. During his two months and sixteen days and nights in Normandy—days and nights of attack, counterattack, defense, and the ultimate reeling retreat—Franz’s life had been saved perhaps a dozen times by his Schmeisser, at least twice by hand grenades, and at least once by a Canadian artillery barrage that miraculously fell short and chopped up an attacking Canadian battalion just as Franz’s company seemed certain to be overrun. But his short trenching spade had saved him many more times than that. Only twice—once during a blissful three-day lull in front of Caen and another time when his regiment was pulled back a few kilos for a five-day rest—did Franz have an opportunity to dig the geometrically perfect Hochloch fifty by eighty centimeters in width and one meter deep. Often his Hochloch was no more than a hastily scrabbled furrow in a soft Norman wheat field, a rut just deep enough to offer refuge from the rising shrapnel of a ground burst or the illusion of refuge from a descending air burst. (For all his wisdom, the old Oberstleutnant had missed the essential point, the Archimedes principle of the infantry: in battle any hole in the ground displaces its own weight in fear.) Often Franz’s hastily created fortress was barely deep enough to let him burrow, pulling in his stomach and breathing shallowly, an inch or two below the trajectory of a Canadian or English machine gun or the spray of a mortar; sometimes he inhabited it only during the ten or fifteen minutes while his platoon gathered itself to dash the fifty or sixty yards from one apple orchard to another, from a farmyard to a house, from a roadside to a church, from a graveyard to a stone fence where a line of khaki helmets rose and at last there was no place of sanctuary for any man of either side.

Digging, or the exercise of digging, could be an end in itself. “Come on, get moving,” he ordered sharply now. “Get well back among the trees or one of these damned tanks will run over you. Sergeant Foster, make your Hochloch big enough for two; have the others help you. I’m going to stay in the jeep and study the map.” He put his flashlight on the now familiar square of paper beneath the square of transparent talc and tried again to visualize what kinds of road went with the red and blue lines stretching to the west, what hills and valleys with the brown contour lines, what distances lay between the black grid lines, how thick the trees would be in the deep green shaded areas, how large and important the towns ahead would be, what arguments there were for trying to rush straight through them, what arguments for taking the side roads and circling around. Forty-eight hours ago the names had all been totally unknown to him; now they were almost as familiar and full of meaning as the two great cities from which he derived his very marrow, his two home towns, Manhattan and Berlin.

Monschau, Krinkelt, Malmédy, St. Vith. He must be ready, depending on where the first break came, to push his jeep beyond the tanks and by-pass any one of these beckoning new towns of his and proceed thence into the rear area of the Amis. Any one of these new towns and a hundred others between here and the Meuse. And if no break came here on the northern flank, he must be ready to wheel south, if necessary all the way into the sector of the Seventh Army, beyond the tiny dark lines of print that read Clervaux, Noville, Wiltz, Longvilly, and Bastogne.

Once they reached the territory held by the Amis, the options were many and open. The written order, long since memorized and destroyed, had listed these: to conduct reconnaissance in depth east and west of the Meuse; to detect enemy tank, artillery, and other movements and report back on them by radio, in person, or by any other means that offers itself; to give false commands, when possible, to enemy units in the Allied sector; to reverse road signs; to remove the tapes from enemy-held roads that are mined; to place tapes on enemy-held roads that were not mined; to cut enemy telephone wires; to spread panic and confusion. There was no specific mention of General Eisenhower or the Arimaspian, but Tannenbaum insisted even that possibility was included in their last oral briefing. “And finally,” the Oberst had added with a sweeping wave of his arm and a huge, delighted laugh, “to give the bastards any and every kind of bloody hell you can possibly think of.”

A dispatch rider, creeping warily along the heaving line of the forming tanks, pulled his motorcycle up beside the jeep. “What outfit’s this?” he asked above his idling motor.

“What outfit’s yours?” Franz asked him in return.

“Keep your shirt on. Divisional signals, Panzer Lehr.”

“Reconnaissance Group, Special Commando Unit, Operation Einheit Stielau.” Let the smart bastard figure that one out.

The dispatch rider pulled a notebook from his belt and turned a light on it. “Look, Kamerad,” he said in exasperation. “Don’t play games with me. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Who the hell do you belong to? Tell me in language I can understand.”

“Try Operation Greif,” Franz suggested more helpfully.

“Well, for God’s sake, why didn’t you say so?” The dispatch rider spoke now with a mixture of resentment and respect. “Hey! Have you seen Skorzeny yourself? Have you talked to him? What’s he like? Is it true he nabbed old Musso with less than fifty men? They say he gets all his orders direct from the Führer, right over the heads of the High Command.”

Franz made no reply. He felt a tiny swelling of pride at the other man’s eager, admiring curiosity, but he felt it best to remain silent.

“All right, then, all right,” the dispatch rider said in the hurt tone of a small boy who has just been refused an autograph. “But you have to tell me one thing whether you want to or not. Have you seen the field marshal’s special order of the day? Or has it been read to you?”

Franz hesitated again.

“It’s the field marshal’s personal order that every man on the front receive his message before dawn,” the soldier on the motorcycle said.

“I don’t know anything about it.”

The dispatch rider drew off his gauntlet, blew on his fingers, reached inside his leather jacket, drew out a sheaf of papers, and handed Franz the top copy. “Here,” he said. “You’re to see that it’s read to or by everyone in your command or traveling in your vehicle.” He rode off down the edge of the column. “Well anyway,” he called back, still a trifle aggrieved, still a trifle awed, “Good luck.”

Franz read the paper twice, once hurriedly to see if it required any action on his part, the second time translating it into English, wondering how it might sound ten years from now in the history class at P.S. 77 at the corner of Eighty-sixth Street East and First Avenue in Manhattan, how it might sound at some future anniversary service of the German-American Bund.

It would ring forth again, he knew at once, as pure and hard and strong as the first “Sieg Heil!” Whatever doubts, whatever interventions, whatever interruptions, whatever unhappy compromises had been forced in upon it, this was still the untouched distillation of a faith, the clean etching on the blade of a clean, unstained dagger: Blut und Ehre, Blut und Ehre, blood and honor, blood and honor.

His tough blue eyes had not felt the sting of tears since the summer morning in 1939 when he’d looked back from the Hudson River toward the receding docks, looked at the stony palisade of skyscrapers that shut his vision off, perhaps forever, from the place where he was born; looked a final time and then gone below to sit alone until the land was out of sight.

Now he felt tears again, but these were not tears of melancholy. They were tears of simple devotion and an almost unbearable exultation. The paper banner cried:

Soldiers of the Western Front! Your great hour has come. Strong attacking armies are advancing against the Anglo-Americans! I do not need to tell you more than that. You yourselves feel it! We gamble everything! You bear in yourselves the holy duty to give all and to achieve the superhuman for OUR FATHERLAND and OUR FÜHRER!

Commander in Chief West

Von Runstedt

Field Marshal