7
Harry Bontecou, age eighteen, goes to war
One year after Joe McCarthy flew his first combat duty, Private First Class Harry Bontecou faced combat for the first time, in Belgium. One year later, First Lieutenant Harry Bontecou, AUS, 103rd Division, was serving as duty officer at Camp Plattling in West Germany. It was after midnight, and he’d be on duty until six in the morning. Every half hour he would open the heavy wooden door of the onetime farmhouse, converted now for army use, and expose his face to the bitter cold.
He thought back to the night one year ago. He was doing very different duty on his current assignment, to keep guard over refugees from the Soviet military. Then, two weeks after graduating from basic infantry training at Camp Wheeler, Georgia, Harry Bontecou had been in hard combat. Hitler was making his last major play. In mid-December the Germans chose the hilly and wooded country of the Ardennes to launch their great counteroffensive. It came to be called, after the profile of the German offensive across the Belgian border, the Battle of the Bulge. The lights that caught the eye that night weren’t the moon’s glare and the stars, so vivid tonight. They were the traceries of machine-gun fire. Harry heard now in his memory the confused and confusing orders of his platoon commander, Lieutenant Rothschild. Harry wasn’t absolutely certain whether the order had commanded his squad to go forward from their improvised position along the front, or to retreat to yesterday’s position. He checked quickly with Pete on his right, but he wasn’t sure; neither was Reid, on his left.
Neither of the two commands, however contradictory, would have surprised Private Bontecou. In the last five days they had reversed direction three times as the Nazis bore down … then gave way … then bore down again. The anxious and harassed Allies fought with counter determination under the dogged leadership of General Anthony McAuliffe. The line went back and forward. It was distorted, it zigzagged, and more than once the men being fired at dead ahead were fellow Americans; or fellow Germans. One morning Harry had heard the captain on the radio barking out the message to headquarters that there was no way to hold on, let alone repel the enemy, without massive air support quickly; instantly. Harry’s platoon did retreat, but two days later they were back. Most of them. Not Jesse, nor Coady, Phillips, nor Stimson. Lieutenant Rothschild was gone.
This night Harry Bontecou stayed out in the cold long enough to revive the memory of that other cold a year ago. Intentionally, he overdid it—waited in the cold until the features on his face cried out for relief, the fingers of his hands tingling with pain. Only then would he duck back into the office and luxuriate in the same warmth he’d felt in the hospital, where he woke after the operation on his shoulder.
A sound interrupted his reverie. The telephone rang. The memory clouds quickly disappeared. He picked up the receiver. The duty sergeant’s voice came through. “Okay on Gate C, Lieutenant.”
“Lieutenant.” Lieutenant Bontecou. He mused. The only other Bontecou he knew of was lieutenant governor of New York State and no relation. Harry allowed himself to recall the private pleasure and pride he had taken in the hospital when Major Autrey, a thin smile on his face, brought him the special order. He had been awarded a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant.
He was well in six weeks, and by then they all knew that the Germans had lost the war. Late in a cold March afternoon he heard the short-wave report—the Luftwaffe had run out of fighter planes to deploy against the advancing Allied armies. Why, oh why doesn’t Hitler just—call it a day! Jetzt ist Feierabend. Now is quitting time. Harry was spending time with a German language book during the long hours in the truck and at night in his pup tent with his flashlight. What was this loyalty to Hitler from the soldiers the Allies were killing and maiming every day? He pondered that question with searing incredulity on April 8, when his division opened the gates of the Nazi extermination camp at Gotha, and he learned—and saw—what, in addition to fighting wars on two fronts, was Hitler’s other major killing enterprise.
Now, decorated-in-combat First Lieutenant Bontecou was a camp guard. He looked up from his book. He was reading Boswell’s Johnson, received in the mail from his mother two days earlier and inscribed, “Darling Harry: This will shorten the long hours. Hint: You can always find plenty to read that stands the test of time. This book has never been out of print since 1791, when first published. This edition was published in 1926, the year you were born.”
His last day in New York before shipping out to combat duty had begun as usual, as expected. Dorothy Bontecou had given him breakfast and was at the door just after eight, to leave for the subway and her job at the New York Public Library. That night they would dine alone with the bottle of champagne his mother had spoken of; the next day he would go off to war.
On the matter of the information Harry needed, she told him to look in his father’s trunk in the office where he had worked in their brownstone on the West Side. “Whatever the insurance company needs has to be there,” she called up from the door before shutting it behind her. Harry walked over to his father’s dusty office, still crammed with books and papers, the big Royal typewriter jutting out from one hollow of the desk. Harry sat down in his father’s chair to gather his thoughts. He had odds and ends to attend to before leaving the country for the first—and last time? he permitted himself to wonder. He had read attentively the morning paper giving the news of the bloody campaign in Belgium. With all that secrecy surrounding his battalion’s movements, it was obvious that was where they were headed. But now he needed information on his father for the army insurance form, his serial number in the national reserve. Well, that was for later. Now, to the Metropolitan Museum to see the exhibit of modern Mexican art Miss Yglesias, his Spanish teacher at high school, had warmly recommended in her telephone call yesterday. And he would pick up the course catalog at Columbia and scan it voluptuously.
He lunched at the Automat near the museum and walked back to the house to search out the serial number, dating back to his father’s college days. Harry climbed up to the room where his father had sequestered himself most of every day. He opened the creaky trunk and saw what he had expected, great deposits of papers and envelopes. He flipped by what seemed thousands of packets of poetry and lecture notes and lecture clippings and letters from poets and professors. And there, finally, was a scrapbook of his dad’s years at Columbia, 1919 to 1923—he must have fingered this book before, because he remembered seeing as a boy the photograph of his father posing earnestly as manager of the tennis team at Columbia. He spotted a folded sheet of paper with a yellow sheet attached, a preprinted form with check marks here and there. Curious, he began reading the letter. It was addressed to his father from a Dr. Homer Babbidge at Lenox Hill Hospital. The text was a single paragraph:
Dear Mr. Bontecou:
This last, enclosed, is the end of the line as far as medical science has taken us. There are no further laboratory tests to take. Your sterility is, as originally diagnosed, a case of azoospermia, a congenital disorder.
Harry went cold. His eyes froze on the doctor’s signature. And then traveled, what seemed inch by inch, up to the top of the page. The date was October 7, 1925.
A year before he was born.
He had begun to sweat as, mechanically, he continued his search for the national reserve number. He stayed seated on the floor, his legs crossed, staring at the trunk. He couldn’t think what to do.
He looked over at the photograph of—No. It wasn’t his father. All that … stuff in the trunk. It belonged not to his father. It was the … collection of … his mother’s husband. He would have to get used to that formulation. He didn’t know what to do. He knew only this: He needed right away to leave Eighty-seventh Street. Before his mother got back.
He packed quickly—not difficult for a soldier who, the following day, would embark on a troopship to the western front. The note to his mother he scratched out on the kitchen table read:
Dear Mom,
Awful. Call from AA company comman
der’s office. Departure schedule moved up. Bad news on the fighting front, I guess. I have to report to the Brooklyn Army Depot by 10 P.M., which means I have no time to lose. Will write the first day I get over.
Love, Harry
Would he have signed off with profuser signs of affection if he hadn’t opened the trunk? He supposed so. But she would surely attribute the economy of his closing to the abruptness of his sudden recall, and to apprehension about the future.
Camp Plattling in postwar West Germany was hardly an extermination camp. But there were three thousand human beings in that camp behind barbed wire, forbidden to leave. It was the responsibility of the 103rd Division, of which Harry was an officer, to keep them there until the conquering lions settled the question, Where would they go?
Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, speaking for no less than Joseph Stalin, had publicly insisted on June 29, 1945, that the Russians among them were to be “repatriated.” Zhukov spoke of men (the women and children had been released) who had “treacherously fled their duty.” Harry had seen no notice of the Zhukov demand. He was told of it by Major Chadinoff, the fiery regimental doctor obsessed by the evil—“Yes, I mean evil!—”character of the fateful deliberations of the U.S./British command.
Plattling, along with a half dozen other U.S. Army camps, detained Soviet citizens who had run, walked, crawled, bribed, lied, or persuaded friends/relations/bureaucrats to give them refuge from the Soviet army. Some had been captives of Hitler who escaped. Most were refugees from the Soviet army. Hitler had run deep into Soviet territory until he was stopped at Stalingrad. Behind him, over the six-hundred-mile stretch of territory he had overrun, he left scores of thousands of prisoners. In the turmoil and cold and hungry desperation, many escaped the German camps and made their way not to the east, to penetrate the fluctuating Nazi-Soviet war line, but instead went west, seeking relief both from the native despot in Moscow and the German despot in Berlin. They were Ukrainians, Poles, East Germans: men fleeing by whatever means the westbound Communist juggernaut, scurrying past the Polish-Soviet border into central Germany. Captain Pelikan from G2 explained to the officers of Harry’s regiment at one of the weekly information sessions that Washington and London were bound by promises made at the wartime Yalta and Potsdam conferences. The Geneva agreement of 1929 acknowledged a right of prisoners of war to refuse repatriation, but these refugees were not protected formally because they were not in uniform. It was widely predicted that Stalin would deal cruelly with the soldiers. Stalin didn’t need reasons to send millions to Gulag and death. He had, this time around, reasons that satisfied him and everyone who surrounded him, who labored mightily to satisfy Stalin. It was only left to General Eisenhower and General Montgomery, the principal military representatives of the United States and Great Britain, to maneuver as they could. The sole instrument left to Allies reluctant to send the Russians back home to possible torture and death was what Churchill had dubbed the “apparatus of delay.”
“They’re trying to find a way out,” Captain Pelikan explained. “Meanwhile, we have to keep them here.”
Harry wrote to his mother,
When they’re sent back, according to Doc Chadinoff, they’re declared either traitors for having a) pulled out of the Soviet military, or b) dodged the Soviet draft. Or c) they are people who gave aid to the occupying enemy. Or d) they were Russian prisoners of war who, under Nazi control, were exposed to dangerous ideas.
Whatever. They are enemies of the state and will be treated as such. Out of curiosity, Mom, is anybody over there talking about these people? “ … What did you do in the war, Harry?” “Well, I helped win it and later made goddamn sure that every Russian I was in charge of would be returned to the Soviet Union. You see, the Russians had unfilled concentration camps and idle executioners.” I sound bitter, Mom? Actually, we haven’t given up hope. Write your Congressman. Though I guess that won’t do much if Vito Marcantonio is still Manhattan’s man in Congress. I can’t even remember whether in the last election our fellow voters reelected Mr. Communist Party-liner. We’ll see.
Yes, Mom, I already told you I sent in the application form for Columbia. We’ll know in a couple of weeks. I got to go to chow. Now, in case you forget the aphorisms of Dr. Johnson in the book you sent me, Johnson said, “I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.”
All love from Harry
He could see her getting the letter and reading it in the hallway of the brownstone on the West Side. (Cold? Probably—heating fuel was still rationed at home, he knew.) He felt a quite sudden, near-mutinous urge to go home, to leave this bloody, disheveled Europe. But he could wait it out. He was scheduled for release in a matter of weeks. Maybe he’d be with his mother for … the ides of March? Was he conceived on the ides of whenever it was, nine months before his birthday? It must have been very romantic, the situation back then, Mom and Whoever it was who didn’t have a-zoo-spermia. Harry had committed the word to memory, but had to spell it out for himself when, which granted wasn’t often, he thought to summon it up. He wondered where that took place. Presumably not at Eighty-seventh Street.
Erik Chadinoff, M.D., Major, AUS, was thirteen years older than Harry Bontecou and enjoyed most about life at Camp Plattling his late-hour chess sessions with the young lieutenant from New York. (“Never forget. I’m from New York too. In fact, Queens is more authentically New York than Manhattan.”) They would begin at nine, or a little later if Major Chadinoff had heavy duties at the hospital.
Whenever: Chadinoff would appear with energetic delight (“I shall have back at you after the last time”); they would sit in the officers’ lounge, and Chadinoff would bring out of his pocket a medicine bottle, look quickly about him to ensure that the colonel wasn’t sitting there staring at this little breach of rules (only beer was served in the BOQ), and pour out his liqueur, a dark Russian concoction—“Riga balsam,” he called it—in which Chadinoff delighted. It was a drink served at home, he explained one night, waiting for Harry to make his move. The elder Chadinoffs had arrived in New York in 1915 with their two-year-old son. “My grandmother,” Chadinoff explained, stretching out his legs in an exaggerated gesture of fatalism about the length of time Harry would take to make his move, “insisted that my parents leave the country before ‘that foolish Czar Nicholas conscripts all the doctors in Russia and sends them west to fight against the Germans.’ ” Chadinoff’s father had enlisted in the army when Congress declared war in 1917. Erik did not remember his father, who did not return from the war. He grew up in Queens. His mother served the Queens Hospital as a nurse and tutored students at Queens College in Russian.
Erik remembered the earnest reading by his mother of all news reports from Russia. He spoke to his mother in Russian and, when he could write, communicated with his grandmother—“I remember the photograph she sent on Easter 1921.” But when he was nine, in 1922, his grandmother stopped writing. There was no explanation. Months later, his mother’s youngest brother had written to say that the “authorities” had removed the senior Chadinoff lady from her house in the outskirts of Kiev. It wasn’t known where she was taken. “She may very well be alive,” Uncle Alexis wrote. “We don’t ask questions about that kind of thing, though there is no reason why you shouldn’t continue to write to her.” Erik’s mother did. At first the letters were returned, Addressee Unknown; after a while, they went unacknowledged or unreturned.
In high school during the American Depression, Erik attempted, but finally abandoned any hope of succeeding, to instruct his classmates on the failed idealism of Communism. Most of the boys and girls in his class were unconcerned with Russia or its ideology. But the few who were concerned, he told Harry, were enthusiastic about the great Soviet social experiment that would teach the world how to avoid such capitalistic blights as the Depression they were now contending with. Erik’s frustration led him to attempt a little poetry, first in Russian, then in English. His instructor smiled when she read it and said he
had a nice talent for verbal formulations, but he must be careful not to permit himself to be obsessed on the matter of Communism. He had persisted, with Communism and poetry.
Harry didn’t ask to see any of the poetry. He reasoned that if Erik wanted to show it to him, he would do so. Erik Chadinoff was decisive in all matters—what medicine to prescribe, what knight to move, what U.S. foreign policy should be.
At the end of the game one Saturday night, Major Chadinoff asked Harry if he would like to meet with one of the prisoners. “Dmitri Usalov is in the hospital, pneumonia. We’ll lick it, thanks to penicillin. But he’s weak and needs four or five days of beefing up. What’s special about Dmitri is that his mother is—was?—he doesn’t know whether she’s alive—English. His father married her in Copenhagen. She was with the Red Cross, her parents with the foreign service. Usalov was on a Russian freighter that stalled there for over a month during the Russian Revolution—the captain kept getting conflicting instructions from the shipping line and from Soviet headquarters. He met her, they fell in love, got married by the captain, who was frustrated not knowing what to do. Anyway, they sailed eventually on back to Leningrad and went back to Usalov’s home near Kiev, where Dmitri was brought up, speaking English, of course, to his mother. How he ended up at Plattling is a story you might want to hear—from him.”
Harry met Dmitri on the Sunday and after an hour said he had better leave. “Major Chadinoff will court-martial me if I stay any longer. He said you have to rest. You have to ‘rest heavily,’ was how he put it.”
Dmitri laughed weakly, his bright teeth shining in his bearded face. “Will you come again? I have so much liked talking with you.”
“Yes, I can be here on Tuesday. Before I go, when last did you hear from your family?”
“Not since February 1942. Four years ago. On my eighteenth birthday. That was the day I became eligible for the Soviet draft and that was two weeks before the Nazis came. In a little wallet sewn by my mother inside my winter coat I had one hundred twenty British pounds. That would have been more than enough to board a freighter from Odessa to Egypt and Egypt to London, and I had the letter to my mother’s sister in Sussex. But I told you what happened.” Dmitri closed his eyes, and Harry left, resolved to go back on Tuesday.
The Redhunter Page 6
