Under False Flags

by Steve Anderson

  White sheets, he thought. Talk about weaklings, cowards. White sheets were for hospitals. White sheets were nothing more than surrender flags, he told himself as he stomped around the village looking for a rail station—if that too hadn’t been bombed already.

  ***

  In November 1944, everyone from new privates on the line to war correspondents back at division was talking about a German surrender coming and the war ending soon. The krauts were licked, they said. Wendell Lett was hardly fooled. The Germans would not just give up. It was true American troops had taken their first German border city, Aachen, but only after gory and grinding street battles. Rear-line officers, thus inspired, had started taking longer leaves to Brussels and Paris, but meanwhile the slaughter soldiered on among the killing trees inside Hürtgen Forest. And Allied troops would still have to enter Germany proper. Defeating them could take years. They would need Lett for whatever it took.

  Somehow, the Army had kept Lett’s battalion from the immediate front line. Though it was always near. They were still near the border. Lett coped with it. He knew the dates, time, days of the week again. He needed them to spend as much time with Heloise in Stromville as he dared—whole days, afternoons, a couple hours, whatever it took. Sometimes he returned to his billet well after dark, which the green sentries never got used to.

  He and Heloise shared her second-floor room overlooking the main street. They often just lay on the made bed. It was safer there. Breaking down in front of her had only been the start of his episodes. Everyday sounds—a zipper even—made him jump, scramble under the bed, hug a tree. She let him fall asleep on the bed, but knew he muttered horrific things in his sleep by the way he woke up gasping, sweating, whimpering. She didn’t dwell on his fits of terror. She was just there for him. She had stroked his forehead, wiped away cold sweat, helped him breathe right again.

  He had forgotten what it was like, just talking with a girl. Pledging such sweet things to her one moment, then joshing with her the next moment. Suddenly all that he had given up for dead had landed, softly, as if from a parachute, right down in front of him. It was like some kind of rapture, like a guy finding religion—that bliss he’d always heard the nuns talking about, that he had snickered at. The only problem was, this realization made him tremble all the more. It only made the prospect of going back up on the line look even worse. This was worse than dying. Now, he stood to lose the only good thing he’d ever had.

  They lay on her bed in silence, staring at the ceiling. The afternoon was darkening outside, from more clouds moving in, the shadows creating dim shifting shapes above them. Lett had his shirt off. Heloise felt at the thin purple-red welts he had from shrapnel, on his shoulders and back.

  “I was married,” she told him.

  “Was?” he said.

  “Paul. He was in the Résistance. In the AS, the Secret Army. Two years ago, they send him on a stupide mission with no hope. He was shot in the back by the German military police.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lett said. He told her about his not-so ideal upbringing, how it had left him without those deep roots the other Joes felt so strongly. Heloise understood the loneliness. She had gotten used to loss, she told him. Her mother Amelie had died of a cancer when she was twelve. Her father, Jean, had opened a stationers shop after the last war. It never did well. Now this new war threatened to wreck it for good, so Jean had settled for waiting out the battles with drink and sleep. Some called him a dipsomane. And who could blame him? The father didn’t mind having Lett around. Jean often kept watch at the entrance to the courtyard when Lett and Heloise came and went. When they had to go out on the street, Lett let her take the lead. This was her town. She knew the ropes. She was twenty-six, four years older than he. She didn’t let him hold her hand on the street. She said they had to keep things secret, just in case the Germans came back—they didn’t want anyone finger pointing. She had already secluded herself. Many suspected she helped out with the Resistance and didn’t want anything to do with her. What if the Germans found out? They could shoot the whole village, not just those who kept their mouths shut.

  “I don’t know why it is,” she said, “but I feel I can tell you: I had, euh, la fausse couche. I lose our baby. Is this how one says it?”

  “Yes. A miscarriage.”

  “Ah. It was the baby from my Paul. Le Docteur, Doctor Servais, he says it is the stress.”

  “I’m so sorry. But I like that you feel you can tell me.”

  “Yes, but do you know what I think? I fear I did not have enough hope for this baby. In my heart. It is the war. It is the fear to bring a child into this bad world. That is their big crime, the men who make war. They make us mothers think: Why make one’s child suffer this life?”

  “I can’t say I disagree there. Not from where I’m standing.”

  She said nothing. She turned her face away, staring off. Lett didn’t like that stare on her. He knew it too well.

  “The Germans, they won’t come back,” he told her.

  “Oh, they can,” she said. “You have not seen the boche with his back against a wall.”

  “Fighting the Resistance, you mean.”

  “Yes. Paul told me horrible stories. Sometimes he just stared into the air. He trembled like you. He had so many nightmares. I went on some missions, to help them, but he stopped me from doing it.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you either,” Lett said.

  “I will not let you,” Heloise said.

  “Let me what?”

  “Go. Let you go.”

  “I will come back. After, I will,” he told her.

  “And when is this ‘after’?”

  “I can’t say. There is no plan for giving us a real rest. There’s always a plan for sending us back out. I do know that. But we never hear anything, not until we hear it.”

  Lett hadn’t meant to say it like this. It just came out.

  “You can stay here forever,” Heloise said.

  It sounded fanciful with her accent, but she meant what she was saying. Lett knew her well enough by now. She always knew the score before she spoke.

  He turned to her, propping himself on an elbow. “Don’t get me wrong, chérie. I do want to stay, for good. I’ll come back when I’m done, when I’ve done my job.”

  He had expected a tirade, the silent treatment, a huff, something. Heloise only nodded. She snuggled up to him. They closed their eyes a while. When Lett woke again, he found her staring at him with larger, unblinking eyes. She said:

  “Do you know, I still help the Résistance? I keep fake identifications and other materials for them. We help escape American and British pilots. So now I help you.”

  “What? No. I can’t.”

  She punched at the headboard.

  That same afternoon Heloise’s father crept up the stairs, knocked, and whispered to Heloise through the cracked door. She returned to the bed pale and shaken.

  Lett sat up on the bed, listening.

  “There. Do you hear?” she said.

  “Yep.” The curtains were closed, leaving a crack. They went over and peered out. They saw an American jeep slide to a halt below. The jeep had white trim and the occupants white horizontal stripes on their helmets. “They’re MPs. Military Police,” Lett said.

  Two of the three MPs pulled batons and rushed into the inn on the opposite side of the street. Another jeep and a staff car rolled up, unloading war correspondents and officers in dress too crisp for the front.

  The MPs hauled out a GI scruffy from the frontline. The MPs played it up for the correspondents who snapped photos, shaking the poor Joe to make it look like he was resisting.

  “What happens when a man goes AWOL. Those officers you see? Staff-level creatures, rare as a good latrine where I come from,” Lett said.

  “Your commissars, yes? To make the strong warning for others.”

  “We don’t call them that, but, yeah. Desertions are getting worse. So you see? This is what happens,” Lett said, his hands shak
ing so much that Heloise had to close the drapes right. “They could take me away from you,” he muttered. “And they would, too.” He fought tears. They came on just like that, a flicker of heat. “I’m not fooling you. It’s almost as if I was meant to go through all I did, just so I could find you.”

  “You only fool your own self.” Heloise turned away from him. “One day, you will see how they use you, all these self-important commanders,” she said to the wall. “You will see.”

  November passed into December. Back at the billet, Lett hadn’t told Godfrey where he went all the time and Godfrey did not want to know. Often Lett just dropped off his delivery and headed right back to Stromville, even if it was for an hour before dark.

  “Sometimes I wonder if you’ll come back,” Godfrey told Lett finally. “It sounds like you got a better reason than most, by the looks of you. Or should I say, ‘she’?”

  “You shouldn’t. What you don’t know can’t hurt a guy. I don’t want to put you in a spot.”

  “Touché.”

  Back at division, Lett’s offers of captured Lugers and German medals got the rear-liners drooling so much they unloaded their bottles of Johnnie Walker and vintage champagne on Lett like they were used bandages. Godfrey was acquiring quite the taste for vintage champagne. It went well with his records. He even thought about putting together a little revue for the boys.

  One evening when Lett returned, Godfrey wasn’t looking like a man fixing to put on a show. He had bags under his murky eyes. Lett could smell the drink on him, a mix of sweet champagne and mossy scotch. Lett sat with him in the command tent. Lett wasn’t dumb. He had been delivering more maps, which was never a good sign.

  “They got us sending out more patrols,” Godfrey said. “Evidently the line’s a little thin in front of us. The Germans seem thin too, but you never know. We’re moving some positions further up, nice and dug in, and the OPs will creep farther forward. Don’t worry. I see that look. We’re officially still at rest. The whole damn front is.”

  “Any steak dinners yet?” Lett said. When mess ran steak to a unit at rest, it meant they were going back out sooner than later.

  “Apparently there is word of real pork chops coming. Look. I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s the real thing. The problem is, who’s gonna let me know? You don’t know those brass the way I’ve seen them. The way they justify their moves in a briefing, all puffed up like they get. It’s worse than the shelling, a horrifying sight.”

  “So you tell me. It’s because you can’t do anything about it.”

  “That’s right, Wen. And I’m telling you, I hope you never have to see it.”

  December 10, 1944. In their upstairs room in Stromville, Lett made love to Heloise. The windows and room trembled from a constant roar outside. US Army troop trucks rumbled along the main street below, the bulky tires mashing the freezing mud. Lett and his Heloise did their best to ignore the blare, and the bedside clock, and the calendar on the wall, but the traffic roared on, a grinding drone.

  Wrapped in the same blanket, Lett and Heloise went to the window, parted the curtains and wiped the glass to watch the trucks pass, crammed with new troops.

  Heloise’s face hardened as she watched. It reminded Lett of a ballet dancer’s, poised on her toes. “You see? There they are. More cannon fodder,” she said, in French. She had taken to saying more things—the important things—in French.

  Lett still didn’t know much French but he looked at Heloise with that open face of his that wanted to understand. “You don’t have to translate,” he said. “Replacements’ is the official title. They’re even younger than me.”

  “Yes, and what do they replace, eh?”

  Lett didn’t answer her. That morning, he had learned, a load of pork chops had been delivered to the division mess depot.

  The column passed on through, revealing the frosted storefronts below—their quaint and wintry Belgian village had returned.

  Heloise hadn’t lost the hard face. “Something is missing in those trucks,” she said.

  Lett pulled the curtains together. “Is that right?”

  “Oh, yes. There are no generals. No grand officers. The big leaders.”

  “Brass,” Lett said.

  She had learned the word. She nodded. “Yes, and where are they? Where? In comfort. It is the same everywhere, in every land. Streets and schools will have the big names of those brass officers one day. But you? What happens to Wendell?”

  Lett showed her a smile. She didn’t have to tell him. Godfrey didn’t. Hadn’t he just spent the last six months seeing what happens?

  He pointed at the clock, just striking four. “What happens is, I gotta get back to post.” He unwound the blanket from his shoulders and wrapped it around hers. He pulled on his long underwear, wool shirt and sweater, his fatigues and boots, web belt and courier bags. He shouldered his M1 carbine, and hung his helmet on his gear.

  The day before, Godfrey had warned him to start carrying combat gear, just in case.

  Heloise watched him dress. She yanked the blanket off herself and pulled on her red robe of Asian dragons and gold swirls that set off her fair skin and wide blue eyes, far and away the rarest piece of art in the village, Lett thought.

  They held each other. Heloise touched the coil of hair on his forehead, pushing it back to show his face. “Cannon fodder,” she repeated in French.

  “I’m hearing you, doll, but I still can’t know what you’re saying.”

  “It is time. This is what I say to you. It is now.”

  Heloise took Lett by the hand. She led him to a dresser in the corner, knelt down to pull open the lowest drawer, and lifted out the drawer’s false bottom.

  Lett saw passports, ID papers, and forging supplies—glass vessels and papers, pens and brushes of all shapes and sizes. He saw documents in French and Dutch and German, but also US Army leave passes, trip tickets, and GI ID cards, some of them blank.

  “Many of your GIs desert. Some are criminal. They steal trucks, they sell gasoline. But not you. You have the best reason. This can help you, until the Americans leave here.”

  He looked away. “I can’t know about it. It’s marché noir.”

  Heloise shut the drawer. “What do you know about the black market? Against the Nazis, our forgers keep the Résistance going. The Secret Army fights with more pens than guns.”

  “You don’t want me to fight any more. I understand that. But wasn’t that fighting what you were doing—‘V for Victory’ and all that?”

  “It was not for victoire—it was for our survival. Victory, that is a club for rich men and powerful men and they do not let in you.” She added a huff.

  “I am talking survival. That’s all I’m doing. You gotta understand.” Lett pulled Heloise to him, holding her tight. “It’s almost over. I promise,” he said. “And then I’m back.”

  “I don’t want promises.” Heloise pushed off him. “I lost a man once.”

  Lett moved to speak—

  “Paul believed their words of victory, their promises,” she said. “And look at him now. And you? You do not even believe.”

  Lett sighed. He stared down, at the worn bouclé carpet doing its best to adorn the worn plank floor. “There’s not a lot of Joes believing in much. It’s not how a guy makes it on through.” On through to what, he did not specify.

  Heloise had stood back, her hands on her hips. She nodded at the drawer. “This is here for you. I am. When you are ready. No more talk. You understand? You take a new name. It will be my name.”

  Lett drove his mud-caked courier bike back into the forest. For the increased patrols, the medics had set up an aid station near the company CP. Lett had to walk by it to get to Godfrey. Crying was coming from somewhere inside the tent. Near the entrance, GIs sat with bare feet blackened from trench foot. Lett kept his head down and almost stumbled over three corpses covered in frosted blankets. At least the growing cold was good for muting the smell, he thought.

  Repla
cement GIs kept their heads down as Lett passed them. They had arrived from those troop trucks he had seen pass through Stromville, in their crisp field jackets and shiny helmets. He looked back over his shoulder at them shivering and gaping at the ancient stone farmhouses and huts and mass-produced American tents, the piles of trash. Wait till they see the foxholes and OPs farther forward, Lett thought. The veteran GIs, bearded and bundled up with threadbare scarves and rags, were building a fire in an empty drum despite the regs. It must have looked like a hobo camp to the new kids. Hoovervilles abroad.

  In the command tent, a Broadway musical played on a record player. Maps, files, a typewriter, the field telephone, and a mess of bottles stood and lay around. It was a hobo tent with appliances. Godfrey smiled to the music, sitting behind a fold-up desk. The CP was designated for their newest captain, but no one had seen the man for days after ordering Godfrey and the other platoon lieutenants to “man the fort.” Godfrey did so by deploying his record player. Lett stood before him.

  “This one? It’s ‘Top Hat.’ That’s easy,” Lett said.

  Godfrey, nodding, lifted the needle arm and record with fingertips, sliding it back into its sleeve. “Irving Berlin. Well done. Sit, sit.”

  Lett sat. Godfrey pointed to the newspapers on the desk. The headlines read: “Krauts Kaput, Hightail it Home” and “Surrender Before Xmas?”.

  “You believe any of this? Actually, don’t answer that.” Godfrey sighed. “We really don’t know what the Germans are doing over there. Division sure doesn’t. Even with the replacements? We’re far below strength. Ever since . . .” He let his words trail off.

  Lett set a bottle of champagne on the desk. “Prestige cuvée, they call it. Cost me my nice kraut gloves.”

  “Thanks,” Godfrey said, but his eyes didn’t light up like usual. He opened the champagne and it popped, making them start. They traded drinks from the bottle, foam and all.

  Godfrey smiled. “Well? Did you see her again?”