Prisoners of War

by C. Alexander London

  I lowered my gun. I hoped the fighters hadn’t noticed that my hands were shaking.

  Yutz looked at the approaching group. I saw his jaw relax around, but not release, the soldier’s arm.

  “It’s okay, Yutz,” I told him. “They’re friends.”

  He looked back at me, still growling. All his training told him that he had the enemy in his jaws. All his training told him to attack. But we’d turned a corner, I thought. We had an understanding now.

  His body shuddered with the urge to bite.

  “It’s okay,” I repeated at him.

  He didn’t bite. He released the man’s arm and climbed off of him, circling back to me. The man rubbed his wrist. I winced in sympathy. I knew how much Yutz’s bite hurt.

  Yutz sat beside my heel and looked up at me, like I had looked up at that sergeant when he’d first put me in my foxhole with Goldsmith. The look asked, “Okay, now what?” The look wanted someone to be in charge. I guess Yutz needed a new master and, well, I was it.

  “You’ve learned to trust your dog, no?” Michel said as he shook my hand.

  “Maybe he learned to trust me,” I said.

  “The war dog is like a bullet that you can call back even after it has been fired.”

  I looked down at Yutz. His long black face, his brown paws, the broad chest, and the ears that pointed up like devil horns. The searching eyes. I couldn’t think of him like a weapon, like just one more bullet in my gun. He was as much a soldier as I was. More of one, really.

  “How did you find me?” I asked Michel.

  “Hugo came back, told us that your American friends would not help you,” Michel said. Hugo smiled, knowing that his father was proud of him and was sharing that pride with the American stranger. I nodded my thanks to Hugo. He saluted. “And I thought that no young soldier should be without help on a dangerous mission. But I see that you are not entirely without help.”

  Yutz scratched behind his ear with his back paw, waiting for something to happen. He didn’t even look at the man he’d knocked down. Dogs didn’t dwell on the past. That was a trait reserved just for humans, like worry and regret.

  “Yutz is leading me,” I said, pulling the cloth square from the Nazi jacket out of my pocket. Yutz’s eyes followed it as I held it out to Michel. When his fingers touched it, Yutz growled and I put it away again.

  “Very good,” said Michel. “We will come with you.”

  “I want to ask you something.” I leaned in to whisper to Michel. “About Hugo … Doesn’t he have anyone he could stay with?”

  Michel nodded. “His grandparents are not so far from here, and when peace comes, we will live with them together. But now, he wishes to fight the Nazis. I could not stop him if I wanted to.”

  “But this will be dangerous,” I said.

  “To live in these times is dangerous,” Michel answered. “To live only for yourself is dangerous. Hugo understands this. As I believe you understand this too.”

  He patted me on the shoulder. I fought the urge to hug him. He made me think again of my own father, of how much I hoped to return to him, but also, how I hoped he would be proud of what I was doing now. I could have run away, but instead I was running into danger. I was running to help my friend. And these men and this one brave boy were here to help.

  My heart pounded in my chest. I had been in the war for only a few days, and now I was leading a group of Resistance fighters to attack a Nazi prisoner convoy. I hoped that I was up to the job and that Yutz wouldn’t let me down … or betray me.

  There was only one way to find out, and every second that passed was another second that Goldsmith and the rest of the prisoners were farther away.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I stooped to grab Yutz’s leash and our eyes met. He didn’t growl at me, but I stopped.

  Trust.

  He trusted me now. I guessed I had to trust him.

  I unclipped the leash from his collar.

  I let him sniff the cloth square again. His stubby tail started wagging. He took in a few deep snorts of the cloth, then sniffed at the ground and at the air and barked with excitement.

  He shot off, running ahead with his front and back legs pumping in unison, moving faster than any of us could hope to run. He vanished into the forest ahead and I feared I’d lost him. I’d trusted too much and forgotten that he was a German dog, that he belonged to the SS, and that like all dogs, his greatest desire was to run home.

  But from the forest ahead, I heard a bark. I ran toward it, the Resistance fighters running with me, and there was Yutz, standing with one paw raised, waiting for us. The moment he saw us, he barked again and ran on, leading us forward, pausing every few minutes. I realized that his paw prints in the snow made it easier to follow him, and we didn’t have to stop to listen for him so often. He could run and we could follow, and like that, we would find our way to the prisoners.

  The physical activity burned our lungs, but it kept us from freezing, and by afternoon, the snow had stopped and the sky had started to clear. As we left the forest for the open countryside, Yutz stopped to rest. We all gathered around and enjoyed the feeling of sun on our faces. We ate bread and caught our breath. The man Yutz had attacked rubbed his wrist and kept his distance from the dog. The others talked to one another in low voices and scanned the surrounding fields for signs of danger.

  I looked at Yutz, who was panting, his ears perked. He looked at the sky, fully alert. A moment later, we heard what he had heard already. The high-pitched whine of an airplane overhead. First one, then another, then more.

  I searched the sky and saw the shimmering of sunlight off of metal as a squadron of American fighter planes zoomed over the countryside. We could see them over the forest, and we watched them dive, firing off their heavy guns at some unseen German position below.

  The Resistance fighters cheered at the sound of the guns. Hugo grinned and pointed, made airplane noises. He jumped up and down with excitement. I couldn’t help but smile too.

  “The weather has turned against the Nazis,” Michel smiled. “With American planes in the sky, Hitler’s attack cannot succeed.”

  We stood a moment, taking in the sight of the planes overhead, the trails of their exhaust drawing squiggles and zigzags of white cloud against the sky. The whine of their engines, circling and swinging down over the forest, was like music to our ears.

  Miles away, we saw large cargo planes dropping supplies with parachutes onto American positions. We saw high-flying bombers pounding what must have been German tank squadrons or artillery positions, perhaps the same ones that had first led the attack. Hitler was no match for the might of the US Air Force.

  Watching the planes rain down deadly fire, I couldn’t help but imagine the German soldiers curled in their foxholes or cowering beside their burning tanks. A merciless thought crossed my mind, true enough, but terrible all the same: Better them than me.

  The planes were far away, supporting the Americans on the front lines. It was the first time I could see how far I had come into German controlled territory. The Germans had pushed the American army back several miles while Yutz and I had run miles in the opposite direction.

  I realized that once we found Goldsmith, even if we could liberate him from the SS, we would still have to get back to friendly territory somehow without running into the German Army or being recaptured.

  “Ruff! Ruff!” Yutz hopped to his feet, barking, ready to go. He started off, but only made it a few yards when he turned around and looked to me. “Ruff!” he barked again. Worried as I was, I had to smile. He wasn’t going to leave without me.

  We ran, cutting through the forest, maybe another mile, maybe ten. It was hard to tell. My legs ached. Running through the snow was harder than running on normal ground. My feet were soaked when we reached the edge of the forest. Yutz had stopped to mark another tree when Michel came up beside me.

  “You should put this dog back on his leash,” he said.

  I didn’t know why at firs
t, but he pointed down a hill to the stretch of train tracks beyond it, and not far away, the train depot. One low building with a guard tower and a ring of barbed wire around it.

  A train sat in the station, rumbling, and beside it stood a couple of German soldiers, stomping their feet to keep warm. Just beyond them, I saw the Americans, looking pale and weary. Their faces were muddy, their clothes in tatters, and their feet bare. I couldn’t see all of them, but I searched the row of faces for Goldsmith.

  I couldn’t find him.

  But I did see the SS dog handler with his big German shepherd dog.

  I grabbed Yutz and clipped his leash onto his leather collar as quickly as I could. He looked up at me and lowered his ears flat against his head — a look of disappointment, it seemed to me. I pulled him back to the cover of the trees, before the Germans could see us. We needed time to make a plan, to figure out how we would free the prisoners. They were under heavy guard.

  From where I crouched with Yutz, I could hear a train door open, and I watched as they loaded the Americans inside, one by one. As they went, the healthy soldiers helped the wounded ones up, passing them to the men who were already inside the train car.

  That’s when I saw Goldsmith limp forward. He’d been injured somehow. He grimaced with pain as he was lifted onto the train. His left foot was swollen and black. He needed a medic, but I doubted the Nazis would give him one.

  I had to get to him before it was too late.

  I saw Obersturmführer Schultz shouting orders and two other SS men slammed the train door shut and locked it. I could hear the Americans inside yelling and groaning, packed too tightly in the dark train car that had originally been built for transporting cattle, not men. The men of the SS shouted at them and then climbed aboard a different train car, one that had been made for passengers. The dog handler did a walk around the whole train while his dog sniffed at everything, and then he too climbed aboard.

  Even Yutz knew they were about to get away. He strained at his leash and whimpered.

  I turned to Michel, who crouched beside me with little Hugo at his shoulder, both of them eyeing the train depot.

  “They will not move the train while the American planes are in the sky,” Michel explained. “We still have some time.”

  Then Hugo looked at me, his cheeks and nose bright red from the cold.

  “We will stop the train?” he asked.

  I nodded. “We will stop the train.”

  I even had an idea of how we could do it, but we’d need to move quickly.

  “First,” I said, “do any of you know how to fix a broken motorcycle?”

  All but four German soldiers were aboard the train. One remained up in the guard tower, watching over the tracks and the train depot with a large machine gun. The other three stood around with their rifles on their shoulders, waiting for the train to pull out and for peace to return to the quiet country train station.

  The four guards were not the fearsome men of the SS. They were regular German Army soldiers, the kinds of guys I might have been if I’d been born in Germany instead of New Mexico. I gazed through a pair of binoculars I’d borrowed from Michel.

  As I looked closer at the soldiers standing on the platform, I saw that they actually weren’t much like me at all. They weren’t much like any soldiers in the United States Army. Two of them were old men, gray haired and stoop shouldered. The other one was a boy about Hugo’s age. His pants were too big, and his coat hung off him almost to the ground. I couldn’t tell about the guy in the tower, but I could guess. All the healthy young men my age were off at the front lines fighting the war. Lucky for us, guarding train stations wasn’t very important to Hitler, so he didn’t put his best troops on the job. These German soldiers looked anxious, waiting for the train to leave. I wondered if the SS frightened them as much as they frightened me.

  In the distance, I heard the whine of the airplane engines, but I couldn’t see them in the sky anymore. The German soldiers looked up too. The engine sounds faded. The bombing runs were over, and the planes were on their way back to England to refuel and reload. The train engine hissed and chugged and, with a loud screech, the train pulled inch by inch out of the station.

  I held my breath. Yutz panted beside me. Even though it was freezing out, his tongue hung long and pink from the side of his mouth. He shifted on his paws and moved like he wanted to chase the train.

  “You’ll get your chance,” I told him.

  I waited for the train to speed up. It pulled from the station and I watched it go, pistons chugging, steam rising. For my plan to work, the train had to be far enough away from the depot to be out of the machine gunner’s sight.

  From where I was hidden among the trees, I couldn’t see Michel or Hugo or the other Resistance fighters. I had to hope they could get in position farther down the track fast enough. Once my plan started, there would be no going back. If they weren’t there in time, I was doomed, along with Goldsmith and the other prisoners.

  I ran my arm down the gray front of the German officer’s coat, feeling for the first time like my outfit was a disguise. Then I gripped the handlebars of the motorcycle tight in my fists, and I kicked the engine to life.

  When it revved and roared, I let out my breath. At least it worked. In the sidecar of the motorcycle, Yutz barked, and I shifted into gear.

  We shot from the forest with a roar and zoomed down a small slope. I glanced at the German soldiers as I raced alongside the tracks and past the train station and gave them the famous Nazi salute, one arm raised high with my palm flat out in front. Driving one-handed, the bike wobbled and I almost lost control, but they must not have noticed, because they returned my salute as I zoomed by. As far as they knew, I was a German officer with a dog racing to catch up to the train I’d just missed.

  So far, so good.

  Now we just had to catch the train.

  I squeezed the throttle and sped the motorcycle, bouncing Yutz up and down on the icy terrain by the side of the railroad track. Since the snow had stopped falling and the air was still freezing cold, I was driving on packed and slippery ice. I could feel the wheels skidding and sliding beneath me, and I did my best to keep from crashing into the tracks or flipping over sideways. I didn’t dare look back to see if the German soldiers had noticed that I drove like someone who had never been on a motorcycle before. In truth, I hadn’t.

  I drove as fast as I could. Yutz lifted his nose to the air and held his mouth slightly open so that his tongue flapped in the breeze like a banner. I didn’t know if dogs could smile, but it sure looked like Yutz had a grin on his face. He seemed comfortable in the sidecar and with the wind in his face, and I realized then that even though it was my first time on a motorcycle, it might not have been Yutz’s. I almost wished he could do the driving.

  We followed a bend in the tracks that cut through more forest, taking us out of sight of the train station and the watchtower. Up ahead, I saw the back of the train chugging along. I lowered my head so the wind wouldn’t blow so strongly into my eyes and so any SS soldiers guarding the back of the train wouldn’t be able to get a good look at me. I was too short and too dark-skinned to be a Nazi. As long as I moved fast, I hoped I could slip past them and buy enough time to spring our trap.

  I steered a little bit wide of the tracks. Trees whipped by beside me, and I had to duck to avoid getting my head taken off by the branches. I jerked the bike away from the woods and heard the sickening scrape of metal on metal. Sparks flew.

  Yutz flinched to the side and then gave me a snarling look. I’d gotten too close to the tracks on his side.

  “You want to drive?” I snapped at the dog, and leaned forward, squeezing the throttle harder. It pinched my fingers, but I was gaining on the train. I saw the face of one of the SS soldiers appear at the railing of the caboose, all the way at the back. He wore his long gray coat open, and it flapped in the breeze. He held a submachine gun in his hands, and he watched me approach, his finger on the trigger.


  I gave the Nazi salute again, keeping my head down and doing my best to keep the motorcycle steady. He returned the salute, and I accelerated. I could feel the officer’s eyes watching as I drove by the caboose.

  I had to get to the front of the train quickly now, before he wondered why I didn’t have a helmet or goggles like a motorcycle driver normally would.

  “Here we go,” I told Yutz. He couldn’t hear me over the breeze, but he looked ready. His tongue no longer flapped from his mouth. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, ears pointed and alert. He’d been bred for battle, and I suppose he could sense that it was coming.

  I still didn’t know whose side he would be on.

  I glanced at the cattle cars as I sped past them.

  I passed several freight cars and a flatbed car with a large antiaircraft gun on it and a few cattle cars, one of them holding the American soldiers on their way to a death camp.

  As I approached the engine at the front, I saw another SS man step out to the metal railing on its side. He did not look happy to step out into the cold wind.

  His machine gun rested on his shoulder and his head cocked to the side. It reminded me of Yutz looking puzzled. I waved my arm, trying to signal him to slow the train. He shouted something, but I couldn’t hear it over the roar of the train and the rumble of the motorcycle.

  He shouted again and waved me closer. I sped up and eased myself as close as I dared to the side of the engine. Yutz kept his eyes up, on the officer. I knew the guy was only letting me get so near to the train because he thought I was on his side. If he got a good look at me or asked me a question, my whole disguise would fall apart. But still, he waved me closer.

  My motorcycle bounced along next to the train, so close that the SS man could easily have bent down to pet Yutz in the sidecar.

  “Was ist los?” he yelled. I kept my eyes focused forward. I had to keep the motorcycle from crashing. I didn’t answer. I tried to make some sort of signal to get him to stop the train. He must not have understood, because he shouted again, but I had to weave away from the train to dodge a tree branch, and I didn’t hear him.