Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  “On the downbeat,” he said. “ ‘Chattanooga Choo-choo.’ Make it hot! Make it real hot! One, two, three, and four . . .”

  The music burst forth, exploding like a star shell in the air around them. It soared into the sky, lifted above the barbed wire and the guard tower, flying birdlike into the clear blue, and disappearing, fading in the distance beyond the tree line and its promise of elusive freedom.

  The musicians played with ferocity, unbridled intensity. Within seconds beads of sweat emerged on their foreheads. Their instruments bent and swayed with the rhythms of the music. Every few moments one of the band members would step forward into the center of the semicircle, soloing, dominating the syncopation, cutting loose with a saxophone’s plaintive wail or a guitar’s edgy energy. The men did this without a sign or a signal from the bandleader, reacting more to the surge of music that they had created, an old-time revivalists’ intensity, responding as if some heavenly hand reached down and nudged them gently on the shoulder. “Chattanooga Choo-choo” flowed like a river directly into “That Old Black Magic” and then into “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B”—where the bandleader stepped to the forefront, blasting out trumpet calls in time with the other instruments. The music continued, unrestrained, unfettered, uninterrupted, dipping, swaying, inexorable in its force, each tune smoothly blending with neighborly friendliness into the next.

  The huge crowd of kriegies stood stock-still, quiet, listening.

  The band played nonstop for close to thirty minutes, until the members seemed red-faced, like sprinters exhausted by the effort, gasping for air. The leader, sweat dripping from his forehead, lifted his left hand from the trumpet as they swept into the final searing bars of “Take the A Train,” raising it high above his head, and then abruptly sliced it down through the air, and the band, on cue, stopped.

  There was no applause. Not a sound emerged from the massive crowd of men.

  The bandleader looked across at the members of the group and nodded his head slowly. Sweat and tears mingled freely on his face, glistening on his cheeks, but his lips had creased into a half-smile of sorts, one that appreciated what they’d done, but still twisted with the sadness of the reason. Tommy Hart did not see or hear the command, but the band abruptly stepped into parade rest positions, instruments held like weapons at their chests. The bandleader walked over to a trombonist, handed the man his own trumpet, then did a sharp about-face, quick-marching to the wire and picking up the lone clarinet. Still facing out to the woods and the great world beyond the wire, the bandleader lifted the instrument to his lips and trilled out a single, long slow scale. Tommy did not know if the man was improvising or not, but he listened carefully as the clear, smooth notes of the clarinet danced through the air. Tommy thought the music not unlike the birds he was used to seeing in the rolling fields of his Vermont home in the fall, just before the great migrations south. When alarmed, they would rise up into the air in unison, milling about for a moment or two, then suddenly taking wing and, gathering together, flying en masse off into the sun. That was what the clarinet’s tunes were doing. Rising up, searching to find shape and organization, then soaring off into the distance.

  The last note seemed especially high, especially lonesome.

  The bandleader stopped, slowly lowering the instrument from his lips. For an instant he held the clarinet against his chest. Then he pivoted sharply and called out a command: “Stalag Luft Thirteen Prisoner Jazz Band . . . attention!”

  The band snapped together, like the carefully fitted pieces of a machine.

  “By column of twos . . . about-face! Drummer please . . . forward march!”

  The jazz band began to move away from the wire. But where before they had been quick-marching, now they moved slowly, deliberately. A funeral cadence, each right foot hesitating slightly before falling to the earth. The drummer’s beat was slow and doleful.

  The mass of kriegies parted, letting the band march through, moving at just more than a crawl, then closed ranks behind them, as the prisoners slowly returned to whatever activity they could find to get them through the next minute, the next hour, the next day of confinement.

  Tommy Hart glanced up. The two German guards in the tower continued to train their machine gun on the gathering of men. They were grinning. They don’t know, he thought to himself, but for just a few minutes there right in front of their eyes and their weapons we all became free men once again.

  He had some time before the afternoon count, so Tommy returned to his bunk room to get a book. Each hut at Stalag Luft Thirteen was constructed from a combination of prefabricated wood and beaverboard, drafty and cold in the winter, stifling hot in the summer. When it rained, and the men were forced indoors, the rooms gained a musty, green odor, a smell of sweat and confinement. There were fourteen rooms in each hut, each holding eight men in bunks. The kriegies had learned that by moving one of the beaverboard walls just a few inches, they could create hollow spaces between the walls, which were used for concealing escape items ranging from uniforms recut to resemble ordinary suits to picks and axes used by tunnelers.

  Each hut contained a small washroom with a sink, but showers were located in a building between the North and South camps, and men needed an escort to use them. They were not used regularly. Each hut also included a single working toilet, but it was operated only at night, after lights out. During the day, the kriegies utilized outside privies. These were known as Aborts, and accommodated a half-dozen men at a time. They afforded a slight degree of privacy—wooden partitions separated the polished wooden seats. The Germans provided adequate supplies of lime, and Abort details liberally scrubbed the area with strong disinfecting GI soap. Each pair of huts shared an Abort, which was located between the buildings.

  The men cooked for themselves, each hut maintaining a rudimentary kitchen with wooden stove. The Germans provided some minimal rations, mostly potatoes, terrible-tasting blood sausage, turnips, and kriegsbrot—the hard, dark war bread upon which the entire nation seemed to exist. Kriegies were inventive cooks, coaxing varied and different tastes from the same foodstuffs by mixing and matching. The food parcels either shipped by relatives or issued by the Red Cross were the foundations for their meals. The men were always hungry, but rarely starving, although to many the distinction seemed narrow.

  Stalag Luft Thirteen was a world within a world.

  There were daily classes in art and philosophy, musical performances almost nightly in Hut 112, which had been dubbed The Luftclub, and a theater with its own regular troupe. It was currently performing The Man Who Came to Dinner to rave reviews in the camp newspaper. There were spirited athletic competitions, including a storied softball rivalry between the top team in the South compound and a squad from the British North camp. The British did not totally understand many of the subtleties of baseball, but two of the pilots in their camp had been bowlers for the national cricket team before the war, and they had adapted quickly to the concept of throwing strikes. There was a lending library, which kept an eclectic combination of mysteries and classics.

  Tommy Hart, though, had his own collection of books.

  He had been midway through his third year at Harvard Law School when Pearl Harbor had been bombed. While some of his classmates had deferred enlisting until the end of the academic year and graduation, he had quietly joined a line outside the recruiting station near Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston. He had put down the air corps on his recruitment papers on a whim, and several weeks later had carried his suitcase across Harvard Yard in the midst of a January snowstorm, heading toward the T, a ride to South Station, and a train to Dothan, Alabama, and flight training.

  Shortly after his capture, he’d filled out a form for the International Red Cross that was supposed to notify his family that he still lived. He’d left much of the form blank, not fully trusting the Germans who would process the document. But near the bottom had been a space that requested SPECIAL ITEMS NEEDED. On this line he’d written, mostly as a lark: E
dmund’s Principles of Common Law, Third Edition, 1938, University of Chicago Press. To his surprise, the book was waiting for him when he arrived at Stalag Luft Thirteen, although it had been mailed by the YMCA organization. Tommy had clutched the thick volume of legal precedents to his chest throughout his first night at the camp, like a child would hold a favorite and reassuring teddy bear, and for the first moment since he’d seen the flames streaking across the Lovely Lydia’s right wing, actually dared to think he might survive.

  Edmund’s Principles had been followed in quick order by Burke’s Elements of Criminal Procedure and by texts on torts, wills, and civil actions. Tommy had acquired works on legal history and a secondhand but valuable copy of the life and opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He had also requested a biography and selected writings of Clarence Darrow. He was particularly interested in the man’s famous jury summations.

  So while others sketched or learned lines and hammed it up on stage, Tommy Hart had studied. He’d envisioned every course in his final year, and had replicated each. He wrote mock papers, submitted mock arguments and legal documents, debated both sides of every point and issue that he could find, creating persuasive claims to buttress either side’s position on every fake dispute he could imagine.

  And while others planned escape and dreamed of freedom, Tommy learned the law.

  Once a week, on Friday mornings, he would bribe one of the Fritzes with a couple of cigarettes to take him to the British compound, where he would be greeted by Wing Commander Phillip Pryce and Flying Officer Hugh Renaday. Pryce was beyond middle age, one of the oldest men in both camps, white-haired, sallow-chested, and thin, with a reedy voice and flaccid skin that seemed to hang from his arms. He always seemed to be struggling, red-nosed and sniffling, with a cold or a virus that threatened to turn into pneumonia, regardless of what the weather was.

  Before the war Pryce had been a prominent London barrister, a member of an ancient and venerated set of chambers. His Stalag Luft Thirteen roommate, Hugh Renaday, was half his age, only a year or so older than Tommy, and sported a large, bushy mustache. The two men had been captured together when their Blenheim bomber had been shot down over Holland. Pryce often would point out, in his aristocratic, high-pitched tones, that it was all a terrible mistake that he was at Stalag Luft Thirteen at all. It was, he would say, a place for the younger men. He’d only been on that bomber on that particular flight because he’d grown increasingly frustrated with nightly sending men out on dangerous missions that cost them their lives, and so, one night, against express orders, he’d taken the place of a sick turret gunner on the Blenheim.

  “Bad choice, that,” Pryce would mutter.

  Renaday, a thickset tree-stump of a man even though the camp diet melted pounds from his rugger’s frame, would counter, “Ah, but who wants to die in bed at home?”

  And Pryce would reply: “But, my dear lad, we all do. You young men simply need the perspective of age.”

  Renaday was a rough-edged Canadian. Before the war he had been a criminal investigator for the provincial police in Manitoba. A week after he enlisted in the RCAF, he’d received word of his acceptance into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Faced with the choice of following the career he’d always dreamed of or sticking with the air corps, he’d reluctantly put off his appointment to the Mounties. He would always conclude the conversation with Pryce by saying, “Spoken like an old man.”

  On Fridays, the three men would regularly meet and discuss the law. Renaday had a policeman’s attitudes, all straightforward, fact-driven, and direct, constantly seeking the narrowest line through any case and argument. Pryce was the precise opposite, a master of subtlety. The older man liked to soliloquize on the aristocracy of conflict, the princeliness of distinctions between the facts and the law. More often than not, Tommy Hart served as the bridge between the two men, charting his course between the older man’s flights of intellectualism and the younger man’s dogged pragmatism. It was, he thought, a part of his schooling.

  He hoped the tunnel collapse would not prevent him from attending their regular weekly session. Sometimes, after discovering a concealed radio or other contraband, the Germans would lock down the camps as punishment, and the men would be forced to spend days indoors. Travel between the two compounds would be curtailed. Once a soccer game between North and South squads was canceled, to the fury of the British, and relief of the Americans, who’d known they were destined to be slaughtered, and much preferred to play their British counterparts in basketball or baseball.

  This week, the three men were scheduled to discuss the Lindbergh kidnapping. Tommy was to argue the carpenter’s defense, Renaday taking the part of the state, with Pryce acting as arbiter. He felt unprepared, constricted not merely by the facts but by his position. He had felt much more comfortable the previous month, when they’d argued the details of the Wright-Mills murder case. And he’d been much more confident in the dead of winter, when they’d dissected the legal aspects of Jack the Ripper’s Victorian killing spree. To his immense delight, his British friends had been constantly on the defensive during that debate.

  Tommy took his copy of Burke’s Criminal Procedure from a shelf next to his bunk and exited Hut 101. Early in his stay at Stalag Luft Thirteen he had designed and built himself a chair using the leftover wooden crates in which Red Cross parcels were shipped to the camp. The chair resembled an Adirondack-style chair, and for POW camp furniture was widely admired and immediately and frequently copied. The chair had several important details: it only required a half-dozen nails to hold it together and it was actually fairly comfortable. He sometimes thought it had been his only real contribution to camp life.

  He moved the chair into the midday sun and opened the text. He was, however, hardly a paragraph into his reading before a figure hovered into view, and he looked up at the same moment he heard the familiar Mississippi drawl.

  “Hey, Hart, how y’all doin’ this fine day?”

  “I don’t think I’d call it a fine day, Vic. Another day. That’s all.”

  “Well, another day for you and me, maybe. But the last day for a couple of good old boys.”

  “That’s true enough . . .”

  Tommy had to hold his hand up, blocking the sun, in order to clearly see Vincent Bedford.

  “Some men, they got the need, you know, Hart? They got the big desire. It pains ’em so much, they got to try anything to get out. What it amounts to, why, now I got an empty bunk in my room and somebody’s writing that big hurt letter to some poor folks back home. Other men, well, they look at that barbed wire and they figure the best way to get past it is to wait. Be patient. Other men, well, they see something else.”

  “What is it you see, Vic? When you look at the wire?” Tommy asked.

  The southerner grinned.

  “Same thing I always see, wherever I be.”

  “Which is?”

  “Why, lawyer man, I see an opportunity.”

  Tommy hesitated, then replied, “And what opportunity brings you to me?”

  Vincent Bedford knelt down, so that he was on eye level with Tommy. He was carrying two cartons of brand-new American cigarettes. He poked them at Tommy.

  “Why, Hart, you know what I’m looking for. I want to make a trade. Same as always. You got something I want. I got lots that you need. We’re simply trying to reach an accommodation. A mutual opportunity, I’d say. An arrangement promising satisfaction to all parties.”

  Tommy shook his head.

  “I’ve told you before, I won’t trade it.”

  Bedford smiled with mock astonishment.

  “Everyone and everything has a price, Hart. You know that. I know that. Hell, when you think about it, that’s pretty much what those law books of your’n say on each and every page, don’t they? And anyways, what y’all think is so important about knowing what time it is? There ain’t no special time, here in this place. Wake up the same every day. Bed at night, jus’ the same. Eat. Sleep. Roll call. Every day, j
es’ the same. So, tell me, Hart, why y’all need that watch so damn much?”

  Tommy glanced down at the Longines watch on his left wrist. For an instant the steel casing reflected a burst of sunlight. It was an excellent watch, with a sweep hand and jeweled mechanism. It kept precise time and seemed oblivious to the shocks and batterings of war. But, more important, etched into the back were the words I’ll be waiting and the initial L. Tommy merely had to listen to the muffled ticking to be reminded of the young woman who’d given it to him on his last leave home before shipping out. Bedford, of course, knew none of this.

  “It’s not the time it keeps,” Tommy said in reply. “It’s the time it promises.”

  Bedford laughed out loud.

  “Man, what you mean by that?”

  The southerner smiled again. “Suppose I fix it so you gets to see those limey friends of yours whenever you want? I can do that. Suppose you start getting an extra parcel each week? I can make that happen, too. What you need, Hart? Food? Some warm clothes? Maybe books? Even a radio. I can get you one. A good one, too. Then you be able to listen to the truth and not have to rely on all the scuttlebutt and rumor that floats around this place. You jes’ got to name your price.”

  “Not for sale.”

  “Damn.” Bedford stood up, finally irritated. “Y’all ain’t got no idea what I can get with a watch like that.”

  “Sorry,” Tommy replied briskly.

  Bedford seemed to snarl for a moment, then replaced the look of angry frustration with another grin.

  “Time will come, lawyer man. And you’ll end up needing to take less than you’re offered here today. Ought to know when a trade is ripe. Don’t want to be making no trades when you truly need somethin’. Always get the short end, then.”