Prisoners of War

by C. Alexander London

  I vowed right then and there that no matter what happened, I would not retreat until I had saved my friend. I would not tuck my tail and run. Never again.

  “Come on, Yutz,” I told the dog, turning back across the field the way I had come. The dog did not resist. He trotted along at my side, and he didn’t even growl. I guess we had a lot in common. Even if we were on opposite sides of this war, we were both soldiers without an army.

  I had no help. My countrymen were in retreat, Hugo had gone off, probably thinking I’d be safe with the Americans, and my only ally was Yutz, a Nazi war dog.

  I was more tired than I think I’d ever been in my life. When was the last time I’d had a real night’s sleep? Probably before I joined the army.

  The last two days had been the worst of it. My body ached, my left hand felt cramped from holding Yutz’s leash for almost thirty-six hours straight, and my cold feet had rubbed themselves raw inside my boots. There was a definite squishing when I walked, and I did not really want to know what was causing it.

  I had to take stock of everything I had that could be useful. I had my bag of medic’s supplies, the Nazi canteen, the canvas bag with food that Hugo’s father had given me, and now, one M1 carbine rifle, fully loaded …

  I stopped in the field. Yutz stopped at my side, sniffing the ground at his feet. I slid the rifle off my shoulder and balanced it against my hip with my leash hand. Then I used my other hand to check the rifle’s ammo magazine. It was like I’d feared. It wasn’t fully loaded at all. The magazine was empty.

  I pulled back the bolt and checked the chamber. There was one bullet in it.

  Great. I had a rifle with one bullet.

  If I could figure out how to get him on my side, Yutz would be a more valuable weapon than this rifle.

  But that was a big if. He tolerated me now, but I wasn’t sure it went beyond that. I think the dog knew he was far from home and he needed me. As the snow kept falling, covering our tracks, dusting our clothes with powder, and chilling me to the bone, I knew that I was very, very far from home too. And I needed him.

  I slung the rifle back onto my shoulder and made my way across the field to the hedge. In the distance, I heard the thump of artillery, but I couldn’t tell if it was American artillery firing at the Germans or German artillery firing at the Americans.

  I thought back to the day before, the morning when I found myself on the wrong end of the incoming artillery shells as the earth shook and the trees exploded. The bright orange flashes against the crisp white snow. The bloody footprints my boots left. The screams of terrified men.

  I hoped it wasn’t our guys on the receiving end this time. I guess that meant I hoped it was German guys getting shelled. The things war makes you wish on other people.

  I wondered how I was supposed to find the prisoners now. Hugo had gone too soon. I had no guide. The German and American front lines were moving, and I didn’t even know who I might run into next. More Americans? The German Army? How would I ever find the right way?

  I kept moving, back in the direction I had come with Hugo. Up ahead, I saw the path of wreckage left by the tank, and I knew what I would find in that field on the other side. The snowmen. I wanted to go around it. I did not want to have to cross that place where German and American boys lay frozen, side by side.

  But Yutz whimpered and tugged me in that direction. He was a willful dog and he knew the scent of war well. I was new to this. He was a veteran, and he knew what to do.

  I let Yutz lead me into the field of snowmen, and I let him lead me to the first mound of snow that interested him. He sniffed at it and whined, and I knelt down beside it. He looked up at me and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  “Don’t attack me, Yutz,” I told him.

  I let go of the leash. I needed both hands for what I was about to do.

  Yutz didn’t move. He sniffed at the mound of snow.

  I took out the sharp scissors from my medic’s bag and I closed my eyes.

  “Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo.” I said the Lord’s Prayer like my mother had taught me, or at least I said it as best as I could remember it. I skipped some, but the part I needed came to me. “Perdona nuestras ofensas, como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden.” Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  With that, I reached my hand into the snow and found the rigid sleeve of a German officer’s coat. As I suspected, it was an SS man, just as Yutz’s master had been. He was loyal, this dog, even to the dead.

  Perdona nuestras ofensas, I thought again. Forgive us.

  I tugged the whole arm free of the snow, and, moving as quickly as I could, ignoring Yutz’s threatening growl beside me, I cut a square of fabric from the coat.

  When it was done, I let the sleeve go and grabbed Yutz’s leash again. My fingers stung in the cold, but they wrapped around the leash with ease. Already, it had come to feel like an extension of my arm.

  With the other hand I held the cloth up to Yutz’s nose. He sniffed it eagerly, and his ears perked; his tail even wagged.

  “Okay, pal, you lead the way,” I said. “Go get ’em!”

  He looked at me funny. I wished I knew how to say go or get or ’em in German. All I knew was one phrase, but I guess it was better than nothing. Sometimes, the sound of familiar words is enough to take you home, even if they don’t make sense.

  “Nicht schiessen!” I said, and Yutz’s ears twitched, hearing his familiar language.

  He took off, dragging me behind him toward the forest at the far end of the field, away from the sound of artillery fire and deeper into enemy territory.

  The forest was impossibly dark, but Yutz pulled me through the snow with furious speed. I had to trust his instincts, because my own were useless. My instincts told me to hide, back down, retreat. But Yutz led me, sniffing from tree to tree, smelling the ground and the shrubs and the rocks beneath the snow. Dogs do not retreat.

  “Be like Yutz,” I reminded myself. “Be like Yutz.”

  I meant, of course, be brave and tough like him, not be a Nazi. Or pee on trees, which he was presently doing.

  Every few minutes, he would circle back, smell the cloth I held in my hand, and then run on.

  He hadn’t thought to growl at me in hours, and I figured things were going well, when he stopped to sniff at a big mound of snow with odd bits of metal sticking out.

  He circled around the mound, sniffing and whining. When he pulled me to the other side of the snowy heap, I saw that it was the wreck of a German motorcycle, tilted on its side, with its sidecar partially dug into the ground where it had crashed.

  Yutz sniffed at the empty sidecar. Whoever had crashed the motorcycle in the forest was long gone now. I wondered how long it had been wrecked here. I brushed some of the snow away with my sleeve. There were flecks of rust on the spokes of its wheels and some of the paint was chipped, but the blue-and-white logo of the manufacturer was still crisp and clear, as was the Nazi swastika painted on the side.

  Yutz gave it another sniff and then spun in a circle at the end of the leash, spinning three times before curling up beside the half-buried sidecar.

  “Come on, Yutz,” I said. “We don’t have time to rest. Don’t you want to find your masters again?” I asked, as if he could respond to me or even understand.

  He looked at me, snorted, and rested his head on his paws. I tugged the leash, but he stayed put. I knew I couldn’t pull him. He was too heavy, too strong, and too determined to go no farther.

  “I guess you’re the boss,” I said, and leaned against the wreck to catch my breath.

  Now that we had stopped moving, the cold cut into me again. The wind in the forest wasn’t so bad, but the air bit at my lungs every time I inhaled, and it made a frosty cloud in front of me every time I exhaled. My muscles ached, my fingers and toes tingled, and exhaustion swept through me like the German Army had swept through the American front lines.

  In my medic’s trai
ning I’d learned to recognize frostbite (the tingle in my fingers was an early sign) and hypothermia (my drowsiness could be one of the first symptoms). Of course, my drowsiness could also just be from not having slept in days.

  Maybe Yutz was right. What good would either of us be if we ran ourselves to death? I needed to sleep, to rest at least for a little bit. But I was worried that if I sat down, I would get hypothermia from the extreme cold and never get up again. I wondered, Would they ever find me in the forest here?

  Yutz looked so serene, curled around himself with the overturned motorcycle to shield him from the wind. His dark black fur shined in the night.

  The fur, I thought.

  I knew what I had to do to keep myself warm.

  I had to see how close Yutz would let me get to him. I had to snuggle with the enemy.

  I squatted down beside him. His eyes twitched, half open, but he didn’t move. I leaned back and sat in the snow, stretching my legs out in front of me.

  Still he didn’t move.

  I leaned in toward him, reaching up to wrap myself around him.

  He moved.

  In a flash, his head was up, his teeth bared and the black hairs on his back sticking straight up. He growled and snarled and I fell back away from him, losing my grip on the leash. He jumped at me. I blocked him with my raised arm. His teeth wrapped around my sleeve and he bit down. The pain was intense, but with the thick German coat over my uniform, his teeth didn’t tear through.

  “Off! Bad!” I yelled, but those weren’t words to which Yutz responded. His eyes bulged and rolled back in his head in a ferocious mask of rage. His pink gums flared like flames around my arm. He tugged and slashed his head from side to side, wrenching my shoulder. It felt like he would rip my arm off if I didn’t stop him.

  At least I wasn’t cold anymore.

  The dog pressed me down on my back with his front paws on my chest. He didn’t release my arm, but he stopped thrashing and he didn’t bite through. It was more like he was holding me in place. He growled, his lips curling up so I could see the full length of his teeth.

  “You win,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Good boy. It’s okay, I surrender.” I cooed and praised. It didn’t matter what I said; I just hoped the tone of my voice would relax him, would stop him from biting me. If he went for my throat, that’d be the end of me.

  I thought about my rifle lying in the snow beneath me, pressing into my shoulder blade. If I could get it out from under me, there was one bullet in the chamber. Would one bullet be enough to stop this mad dog? Could I bring myself to put a bullet in him?

  Suddenly, Yutz let go of my arm and lifted his face to mine. I could smell his breath, felt its warmth on the tip of my nose. His dark eyes shined with intelligence, but not mercy, and I felt at that moment like I was being judged.

  I can’t explain it, but I felt like the dog saw my whole life — how I hated to hear my parents speak Spanish in public because I was afraid people would think I wasn’t really American; how I signed up for the army against their wishes because I wanted to prove how American I was, and how tough; how I panicked in the foxhole with the dead sergeant, freezing up; how my legs wouldn’t move me back into the battle because, to be honest, I did not want them to; how I failed to fight and how even the men I’d tried to bandage and heal were dead; how I was a bad soldier and a bad medic; and how even that little boy Hugo was braver than I was. This dog could see it all. He could see that I was a coward and that my foolish mission to rescue my friend was doomed.

  Maybe he didn’t see it; maybe he smelled it, because his nostrils twitched once, twice, three times, and then he looked away from me, looked to the forest, where he seemed to find more interesting sights and smells than I could offer.

  I had been sized up by this dog and I had been found lacking.

  Suddenly, with a quick snap from his jaws, he turned back to me and snatched the piece of cloth from the German’s coat from my hand. Then he climbed off of me and trotted away with it in his teeth. I thought he might disappear into the dark, leaving me behind, alone and lost in the woods, but he went back to his burrow beside the wrecked motorcycle, and curled up with the square of fabric, like a child with a blankie.

  Our fight was over. I had lost.

  My arm was sore where his teeth had gripped me, and I lay where he’d knocked me onto my back, catching my breath and trying to slow my heartbeat. He could have killed me, but he didn’t. He could have wounded me badly, but he didn’t do that either. And he didn’t run away, which he could have easily done. His leash left a slithering line in the snow where he had trailed it, but he hadn’t run.

  Maybe I’d needed to fight him and I’d needed to lose.

  Yutz was a proud dog, trained to obey one master, a master from whom I had taken him, and all my tugging him around had put him to shame. Could dogs feel shame?

  I didn’t know. I knew humans could. I knew I did.

  And that was why he didn’t trust me. He could smell my shame. He needed a master, not a coward. If I wanted his loyalty, I had to show him that I was not afraid. I had to show my trust before he would show his.

  It was time to put the past behind me and focus on the future. Maybe now that we’d fought, Yutz could put the past behind him too.

  “If at first you don’t succeed,” I grunted, lifting myself from the cold ground and brushing the snow off my chest and my pants. “Try, try again.”

  Yutz opened his eyes and looked at me. I decided not to come straight at him this time. I didn’t want him to think I was challenging him to a rematch.

  I approached from the side, my hands open, moving slowly. He lifted his head to watch me, the cloth still dangling from his mouth. He growled and I stopped moving.

  “It’s okay, Yutz,” I said. “You won. You’re the boss.” I stood still and let him look me over. I didn’t feel the same burning shame as he looked at me. I just let him look.

  I took another step forward. “It’s okay,” I repeated.

  He didn’t growl. He watched me. When I got next to him, I let out a slow breath and prepared myself for another attack. I knelt down beside him. I put my hand out for him to smell it.

  He sniffed a few times. His ears twitched, and he looked up at me, his eyebrows raised. His lips didn’t tremble and he didn’t show his teeth. He exhaled and let his head flop down into the snow. I stretched my hand out and placed it on his side and I stroked his fur. He stretched and rolled, exposing his belly to me. Now that he’d beaten me, he trusted me to rub his belly.

  I obeyed, happily.

  His fur was soft and warm, passing through my fingers, calming the itch and the ache from the cold. I knelt there in the dark forest petting him, smoothing his fur and rubbing his belly for a long time.

  There is some kind of magic in petting a dog, I think. While I petted him, I felt safe for the first time since the German attack. If anyone passed by, I figured the wreck of the motorcycle hid us well enough. As I petted him, I started to feel hopeful. I felt like I could find Goldsmith again, that I could save my friend, and that maybe, when this war was over, the world might just find a way to be all right, in spite of all the death and horror, if everyone could just a pet a dog.

  I relaxed.

  I don’t know for how long I sat there petting him, scratching behind his ears and daydreaming, but the next thing I knew, it was light out and I was lying on the ground with my head on Yutz’s side like a pillow, rising and falling with each of his breaths. The sky above the forest was light and the snow glared bright white around me. My body was stiff and I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

  Yutz stretched his limbs and snuffled at my head with his nose, knocking me off of him.

  “Okay, okay,” I grumbled. “I’m up…. You want breakfast?”

  I opened my canvas bag and unwrapped one of the sausages. It was frozen solid, so it was easy to snap in half. It didn’t look so appetizing to me, but Yutz ate his in one bite. I had to gnaw mine for a while to soften it.
I felt like a dog chewing on a bone.

  Yutz pawed at the square of cloth on the ground, but he didn’t pick it up again, so I bent down and grabbed it, shoving it into my pocket. Then I bent to get his leash and he growled when my hand went for it.

  I froze.

  “I thought we were past all this?” I said. My arm still ached from last night.

  His low rumbling growl sent a shiver up my spine. The leash was just inches from my fingertips.

  “Come on, Yutz, we have work to do.” I reached for the leash. I didn’t think we could lose any more time. We’d already lost hours by sleeping, and for all I knew, the Germans could have already gotten their prisoners to the train depot.

  Yutz barked, and from the corner of my eye, I saw him lean back on his haunches, preparing to leap, his ears pointed straight up like devil horns.

  “Easy, boy,” I said, even as I braced myself for another dog attack.

  He barked and sprang into the air, but it wasn’t me he was aiming for.

  It was the soldier sneaking up behind me.

  “Aiee!” the man yelled as Yutz sprang through the air and crashed into his chest. The soldier held his hands up to protect himself, just as I had, and Yutz’s teeth wrapped around his forearm, yanking him down to the ground, just like he’d done to me.

  I swung the rifle off my shoulder and pointed it at the soldier. He had on camouflage but no helmet, and I didn’t see any markings on his uniform. He wasn’t with the German Army and he wasn’t American.

  He also wasn’t alone.

  Another soldier came running through the trees and I raised my rifle, my finger on the trigger, about to put my one and only bullet to use, the first time I had ever pointed a gun at a living thing in my entire life, when Hugo came running through the snow.

  “Non! Non!” Hugo yelled.

  His father ran behind him, his own rifle in his arms, and four other men shuffled behind them, all dressed for war and all armed for war. These were Resistance fighters.