Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  “No deals. Not today. Not tomorrow. Be seeing you, Vic.”

  Bedford shrugged, with an exaggerated motion. He seemed about to say something else, when both men heard the shrill whistle of the afternoon Appell. Ferrets materialized by each block of huts, shouting “Raus! Raus!” and men began to emerge from the buildings, slowly making their way to the parade ground.

  Tommy Hart ducked back inside Hut 101 and replaced the legal text on the shelf. Then he joined the flow of men shuffling through the afternoon sun toward the assembly.

  As always, they gathered in rows five deep.

  The ferrets counted, walking up and down the rows, trying to make certain no one was missing. It was a tedious process, one the Germans seemed to accept with dedication. Tommy could never understand how it was that they weren’t bored senseless by the twice-daily exercise in simple mathematics. Of course, he conceded inwardly that on a day that two men died in a tunnel, the ferret who missed a count would very likely find himself on a troop train bound for the eastern front. So the guards were being cautious and precise, even more so than their usual cautious and precise natures ordinarily allowed for.

  When the count was satisfactorily accomplished, the ferrets returned to the front of the formations, reporting to the Unteroffizier assigned to that day’s task. He would, in turn, report to the commandant. Von Reiter did not attend every Appell. But in order for the men to be dismissed, he had to give the order. The kriegies found this extra wait wildly irritating, as the Unteroffizier disappeared through the front gate, heading toward Von Reiter’s office.

  The delay this afternoon seemed lengthy.

  Tommy stole a glance down the formation. He noticed that Vincent Bedford was at attention two spaces away. He looked back to the front, and saw that the Unteroffizier had returned and was speaking with SAO MacNamara. Tommy could just make out a look of concern on the face of the colonel, then MacNamara did an abrupt turn and marched out the gate with the German, disappearing into the commandant’s office.

  It was ten minutes before MacNamara reappeared. He strode swiftly back to the head of the formations of airmen. But then he seemed to hesitate for an instant before speaking out, in a large, parade ground voice:

  “New prisoner coming in!”

  MacNamara paused again, as if he wished to add something.

  But the kriegies’ attention swung quickly in that momentary delay, to where a single U.S. flier, flanked on either side by goons with rifles, was emerging from the commandant’s office. The flier was tall, a half foot taller than either of the guards accompanying him, trim, wearing the sheepskin jacket and soft helmet of a fighter pilot. He marched forward rapidly, his leather flight boots kicking up small puffs of dust from the earth, coming to attention in front of Colonel MacNamara, where the flier snapped off a salute that seemed creased, it was so sharp.

  The kriegies were silent, staring ahead.

  The only sound Tommy Hart heard, in those seconds, was the unmistakable drawl of the Mississippian, whose every word was filled with undeniable astonishment:

  “I’ll be goddamned . . .” Vincent Bedford said loudly. “It’s a damn nigger!”

  Chapter Two

  THE BALL TO THE FENCE

  The arrival of First Lieutenant Lincoln Scott at Stalag Luft Thirteen galvanized the kriegies. For nearly a week, he replaced Freedom and the War as the primary topic of conversation.

  Few of the men had had any inkling that black pilots were being trained by the U.S. Army Air Force at Tuskegee, Alabama, and fewer still were aware that they’d begun fighting over Europe late in 1943. Some of the later camp arrivals, B-17 pilots and crew mainly, told of flights of shining, metallic P-51 fighters diving through their formations in pursuit of desperate Messerschmidts, and how the 332nd fighter wing wore distinctive red and black chevrons painted on their tail rudders. The men from these bombers had had the luxury of some experience in their acceptance of the men from the 332nd; as they pointed out in debate after debate, it really didn’t make much difference to them who it was or what color they were, as long as the fighters drove off the attacking 109s, because being chopped apart by the twin twenty-millimeter cannons mounted in the stubby Messerschmidt’s wings and dying in a flaming B-17 was an ugly, frightening business. But there weren’t many of these crewmen in the camp, and there was still widespread disagreement among the kriegies as to whether any black man had the required intelligence, physical ability, and the necessary heart to fly warplanes.

  Scott himself seemed unaware that his presence stirred loud and sometimes contentious arguments. On the evening he arrived in the camp, he had been assigned to the bunk in Hut 101 that had been occupied by the dead clarinet-playing tunneler. He had greeted the other men in the room in a perfunctory manner, stowed what few belongings he had with him beneath the bed, then crawled into his space and remained quiet for the remainder of the night.

  He told no warrior’s tales.

  Nor did he volunteer information about himself. How he’d been shot down remained unknown, as did his hometown, his background, and his life. Over his first few days in the bag, a few kriegies made efforts to engage him in conversation, but Scott politely and firmly rebuffed each attempt. At mealtimes, he fashioned simple spreads from his allotted Red Cross parcels. He did not invite anyone to share with him, nor did he ask anyone to share from their parcels. What he received he used, alone. He did not join in camp conversations, nor did he sign up for classes, courses, or activities. On his second day at Stalag Luft Thirteen he obtained from the camp library a ripped and worn copy of Gibbons’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and from the YMCA he accepted a Bible, both of which he read silently, sitting outdoors in the sunshine, back against the hut, or on his bed, bent toward one of the windows, searching for the weak light that filtered past the grime-streaked glass and wooden shutters into the room.

  He seemed, to the other kriegies, mysterious. They were surprised by Scott’s standoffishness. Some found arrogance in his aloofness, which translated into a number of thinly veiled cracks. Others merely found his solitude unsettling. All the men, even those like Tommy Hart who might have been seen as loners, relied on and needed each other, if only to reassure themselves that they weren’t alone in the world of confinement that was Stalag Luft Thirteen. The camp created the oddest of psychological states: They were not criminals, but they were in prison. Without each other’s support and constant reminders that they belonged to a different life, they would be adrift.

  But outwardly, Lincoln Scott seemed immune to this.

  By the end of his first week inside Stalag Luft Thirteen, when not wrapped up with Gibbons’s history or with the Bible, he had taken to spending his days walking the perimeter of the compound. One circuit after another, for hours. He would stride rapidly along the dusty trail, a foot inside the deadline, eyes riveted to the ground except for occasional pauses, where he would stop, turn, and stare out at the distant line of pine trees.

  Tommy had watched him, and was reminded of a dog on a chain, always moving at the very limit of its territory.

  He had been one of the men who made an effort in the first few days to enter into a conversation with Lieutenant Scott, but had had no more success than any other. In the midst of a mild afternoon, shortly before the order to start the evening count was to be given, he had approached the lieutenant as the black man made one of his tours of the edge of the camp.

  “Hey, how you doing?” Hart had said. “My name’s Tommy Hart.”

  “Hello,” Scott had replied. He did not offer his hand, nor did he identify himself.

  “You settled in okay?”

  Scott had shrugged. “Seen worse,” he muttered.

  “When new guys come in it’s sort of like having the daily paper delivered to the house, only a couple of days late. You’ve got all the latest, and even if it’s out of date, it’s still better than what we’ve got, which is rumor and official crap over the illegal radios. What’s really happening? How’s
the war going? Any word on the invasion?”

  “We’re winning,” Scott had answered. “And no. Lots of men sitting in England. Waiting, same as you.”

  “Well, not exactly the same as us,” Tommy said, grinning, and gesturing toward a machine-gun crew in the guard tower.

  “No, that’s true,” Scott said. The lieutenant had kept walking, not looking up.

  “Well, you must know something,” Hart asked.

  “No,” Scott had replied. “I don’t.”

  “Well,” Tommy had persisted, “suppose I walk along with you and you tell me everything you don’t know.”

  This request brought the smallest of smiles to the black man’s lips, just the slightest turn upward, and he blew out some wind, as if concealing a laugh. Then, almost as quickly as that moment was there between them, it dissipated.

  “I really prefer to walk alone,” Scott had said briskly. “Thanks for asking, though.”

  Then he’d continued his trek, as Tommy stopped and watched him stride on.

  The following morning was Friday, and after the morning Appell Tommy went back to his bunk. From a small wooden box beneath the bed, he took several fresh packages of Lucky Strikes from a carton that had been delivered in his latest Red Cross parcel. He also grabbed a small metal container marked EARL GREY TEA, and the uneaten majority of a large chocolate bar. In his jacket pocket, he secreted a small can of condensed milk. Then he collected several sheets of brown scrap paper, which he’d used to scrawl notes upon in cramped, tight handwriting. These he stuffed between the pages of a worn text on forensic evidence.

  He walked outside Hut 101, searching for one of the three Fritzes. The morning was warm, and sunlight gave the yellow-gray dirt of the compound a glow.

  Instead he spotted Vincent Bedford pacing along, with a determined look on his face. The southerner paused, his face turning rapidly into a look of anticipation, and quickly approached Tommy.

  “I’ll sweeten the deal, Hart,” he said. “You’re just a hard nut to crack. What’ll it take to get that watch?”

  “You haven’t got what it will take. Sentimental value.”

  The Mississippian snorted. “Sentiment? Girl back home? What makes you think you’ll get back there in one piece? And what makes y’all think she’ll be waiting for you once you do?”

  “I don’t know. Hope? Trust?” Tommy replied, with a small laugh.

  “Those things don’t amount to much in this world of ours, Yankee. What counts is what you got right now. In your hand. That y’all can use right away. Maybe ain’t gonna be no tomorrow. Not for you, maybe not for me, maybe not for any of us.”

  “You’re a cynic, Vic.”

  The southerner grinned.

  “Well, maybe so, maybe so. Nobody never called me that before. But I won’t deny it.”

  They were walking slowly between two of the huts, and they emerged onto the edge of the exercise area. A softball game was just starting up, but beyond the outfield, both men caught sight of the solitary figure of Lincoln Scott, marching along the edge of the perimeter.

  “Sumbitch,” Bedford muttered. “Today I got to do something about this situation.”

  “What situation?” Tommy asked.

  “The nigger situation,” Bedford replied, turning and staring at Hart as if he were unbelievably stupid for not seeing the obvious. “The boy’s using up a bunk in my room and that ain’t right.”

  “What’s not right about it?”

  Bedford didn’t answer directly. “I suppose I got to go tell old man MacNamara, and then he’ll switch the nigger into another room. Boy ought to be housed in some place by hisself, so’s to keep him separate from the rest of us.”

  Tommy shook his head. “Seems he’s doing that pretty effectively by himself without any help from you,” he said.

  Trader Vic shrugged. “Ain’t right. And anyway, what’s a Yankee like you know about niggers? Nothing. Absolutely goddamn nothing.” Bedford drew out each vowel sound, giving each word an elongated importance. “Why, I’ll bet, Hart, that you ain’t hardly ever even seen one before, much less lived with ’em, the way we do down South. . . .”

  Tommy didn’t reply to this, because there was some truth in what Bedford said.

  “And what we come to know about ’em ain’t good,” Trader Vic continued. “They lie. Why, they lie and cheat all the damn time. They’re thieves, every one of ’em, as well. Good many of ’em are rapists and criminals, too. Not all, mind you. But a good many. Now, I’m not saying that they maybe might not make good soldiers. Why, that’s a possibility, because they don’t see things exactly the way white folks do, and they can probably be educated properly in how to kill, and do a right good job at it, I suspect, same as like chopping wood or fixing a machine, though flying a Mustang, I can’t see that. They just ain’t the same as you and me, Hart. Hell, you can see that just by watching that boy walk his way around the deadline. And I think it’d be a whole lot better if old man MacNamara figured that out before some trouble happens, because I know niggers, and there’s always trouble wherever they are. Believe it.”

  “What sort of trouble, Vic? Hell, we’re all stuck here, just the same.”

  Vincent Bedford burst out into a small laugh, shaking his head vigorously back and forth.

  “The one thing may be true, Hart, that we’re all stuck here, though that remains to be seen, don’t it? And the other, why, it absolutely ain’t the same. No sir. Not the same at all.”

  Vincent Bedford pointed at the wire.

  “The wire be the same. But everybody here sees it different. You see it one way, I see it another, and the old man sees it a third. Likely even our boy walking along out there, why he’s probably started seeing it in his own way, too. That’s the wonder of life, Hart, which I’d even expect an overeducated and tight-ass Yankee like yourself to figure out. Ain’t nothing ever the same for two men in this world. Not ever. Except maybe death.”

  Tommy thought that of all the things he’d heard Bedford say, this last observation was probably as close to the truth as he ever came.

  Before he could reply, Bedford clapped him on the shoulder. “Why hell, Hart, you’re probably thinking that I’m prejudiced, but it ain’t so. I ain’t no stars and bars–waving, tobacco-chewing, white-hooded, night-riding Klansman. No sir. In fact, I have always treated every nigger good. Treat ’em like men. That’s my way. But I know niggers, and I know they cause trouble, and that’s what we’ll have here.”

  The southerner turned and eyed Tommy.

  “Trust me,” Trader Vic continued with a small laugh. “Trouble’ll be coming. I can tell. Best to keep folks separated.” He smiled again.

  Tommy kept silent.

  Bedford brayed. “Hell, Hart, you know, I’ll bet even money that maybe my great-granddaddy took a shot at one of your ancestors once or twice, back in the great war of independence, except that ain’t what your damn fool Yankee textbooks call it now, is it? Good thing for you that the Bedfords never were much in the way of marksmen.”

  Tommy smiled. “The Hart family traditionally was always good at ducking,” he said.

  Bedford burst out laughing. “Well,” he said, “that’s a valuable ability, Tommy. Keep that family tree alive for centuries to come.”

  Still smiling, he stepped away. “Well, I’m gonna go do my talking with the colonel. You change your mind, come to your senses and wanna make that trade, you know I am definitely open for business twenty-four hours a day, and Sundays, too, because right now I think the good Lord is paying more attention elsewhere, and not watching out for this particular flock of sheep too damn much.”

  From the playing field, several kriegies started yelling in their direction and waving at Vincent Bedford. One of them waved a bat and ball above his head.

  “Well,” the Mississippian said, “I guess I’ll have to put off talking with the big boss man until this afternoon, ’cause these boys need someone to show them how the great game of baseball is properly played. Be s
eein’ ya, Hart. You work on changing your mind . . .”

  Tommy watched as Trader Vic trotted toward the field.

  From the opposite direction, he heard a distinctly American voice shout out, “Keindrinkwasser!” in half-fractured German. Then he heard the same call answered from a hut a few yards away. The German phrase stood for “not drinking water” and was what the Krauts printed on the steel barrels used for hauling sewage. It was also the standard kriegie early warning for the men in the huts to know that a ferret was walking through the camp in their direction and gave any men involved in escape activities time to hide their work, whether it was digging or forging documents. The ferrets were rarely pleased to be called sewage.

  Tommy Hart hurried toward the sound of the voices. He hoped it was Fritz Number One who’d been spotted lurking around the compound, because he was generally the easiest ferret to bribe. He did not dwell long on what Bedford had said.

  It took a half-dozen cigarettes to persuade Fritz Number One to accompany him to the northern compound. The two men marched through the camp gate into the space that separated the two compounds. On one side there was a barracks for guards, and then the commandant’s offices. Behind that was a brick-and-mortar coldwater shower block. Two guards with slung rifles were standing outside, smoking.

  From inside the showers, Tommy Hart could hear voices raised in song. The British were great chorale lovers. Their songs were invariably wildly ribald, dramatically obscene, or fantastically offensive.

  He slowed his pace and listened. The men were singing “Cats on the Roof ” and he swiftly recognized the refrain.

  “Oh, cats on the roof, cats on the tiles . . .

  “Cats with the syphilis and cats with the piles . . .”

  Fritz Number One had also slowed.

  “Do the British know any normal songs?” he asked quietly.