‘You’re right, Phineas. Everything you just said. It’s very lonely what we do. I hadn’t expected that but it is. I wasn’t lonely back then as a soldier, we were all in it together and we were so young. But I am now as a chaplain. I just spent three lousy days barefoot on this cot wishing somebody would ask me what’s wrong, afraid the whole time somebody would.’
Phineas couldn’t keep his seat. He stood and began a step forward, perhaps to lay a hand to Ben’s shoulder. Ben pointed him back to the stool.
Ben hid his smile at the little nebbish. He thought, the boy has such a good, Christian heart. And such a different one from a Jew. Goyim are so willing and quick to speak out their ills, to ask each other for grace and forgiveness. It must be so healthy for them. Jews, we endure. We’re not a people inclined to ask for help, it has come so rarely. Perhaps like Phineas says, we’re a bit crazier than we otherwise might be.
‘Tell me about your home,’ Phineas said. ‘And the first war.’
Ben knit his fingers and dropped his gaze to his lap. He caught himself being reluctant, looking away, his habit of avoidance. Then he brought his gaze to Phineas and spoke.
‘My papa was a German, my mother was Hungarian. They lived in Berlin and left in 1904 when I was five. We settled in western Pennsylvania. Papa was a rabbi in Germany. Respected. He was an eydel mentsch, a gentle, refined man. In America he was a coal miner. I had one older brother, a ganif, a crook. He got killed in the mines in a fight.’
Phineas said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Ben carried on his story. The long-dead brother was so little of what there was to be sorry about.
‘When the war came, Papa told me not to go. I was the only son. He told me to stay in school, to become an American rabbi.’
Ben chuckled.
‘Mama never liked the Germans. She said go, fight them. I couldn’t do what my father asked, Phineas. One brother was a disgrace and he was dead because of it. I wasn’t going to live a disgrace, that’s how it felt when I was eighteen. Everyone was signing up. I wasn’t going to live my father’s life over for him. I joined up. And I never saw my papa again. He died while I was overseas.’
‘That must’ve been hard.’
‘I’ll be honest, I didn’t feel it really deep when I found out. There was so much else going on. Papa dying didn’t hurt any more than the guy next to me. Later... later, when I came home and saw Mama without him. Then.’
Phineas let a silent moment hover, a monument to Ben’s papa and mama. This is something, Ben thought, a Jewish moment from the little Goy. Remembrance, a very Jewish thing.
‘Tell me about the war.’
‘Back then, the 90th wasn’t the Tough Ombres. We were the Alamo Division. I came in as a replacement. Almost everybody else was from Texas and Oklahoma. I joined them in England. On July 4, 1918, we put on a parade for the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. The whole brigade was given a banquet right in the city square. Then we shipped over to Bordeaux for six weeks of training. In mid-August, we got to the front lines at Limey near St. Mihiel.’
Ben paused.
‘Phineas.’
‘Yes, Ben.’
‘I wasn’t the same man back then.’
‘It’s okay.’
Ben let out a long breath.
‘I don’t know if it is.’ He looked away again. ‘Right at the turn of the century, the guns changed. Quick-firing artillery, machine guns, the magazine rifle, this was the first time these things had shown up in large-scale battle. So the armies, we didn’t know what to do with each other. We almost never fought the Boche out in the open, it was a slaughter both ways whenever we did. Instead, we dug in, sometimes a half mile apart from each other, sometimes fifty yards.’
In the same way Phineas had done describing the fighting on Mont Castre, Ben began unconsciously to build images with strokes of his hands. He swept the flat of his palm across a ruined vista he could still see. The land was stripped of vegetation down to soil and rock, every tree was snapped jagged. Even the fallen branches and leaves were blown away by bombs and their green bits burned or swept off by unfettered wind. The first trench in line was protected by a range of barbed-wire obstacles strung between posts. Ben recalled how the posts, arrayed for miles in meticulous order, looked like a vast black cemetery, and the wires made a dark mist that never lifted.
‘The trench systems were pretty elaborate. Three lines in a row, a couple hundred yards apart, all connected by communication trenches. We had bunkers for sleeping and eating. Imagine digging enough trenches for twenty thousand men to live belowground. And the Boche did the same.’
Phineas gasped, the way young men always have at the primitiveness of their elders.
Ben’s hands felt blisters and calluses again. He remembered looking at his nineteen-year-old palms, thinking then how they were not the hands of a rabbi, how much they resembled his father’s coal miner hands.
‘For a month, we sat staring over no-man’s-land. The Krauts dropped artillery on us every day, at dawn and dinner. We did the same to them.’
Ben halted his telling. He stilled his tapping fingers. He’d reached the point in his story where his hands, like the guns of the new century, changed.
Phineas said, ‘Ben, go on.’
Ben set his hands on his knees, to keep them out of the telling.
‘Every night, we sent out scouts. They called us scouts, but we weren’t. We were assassins. Phineas.’
The little chaplain said and did nothing. Ben did not know why he’d said Phineas’s name just then, until he felt the warm drops around his eyes, and knew he was calling to Phineas for help.
‘I volunteered, you understand. No one made me do it. I was mad at my papa. I was mad at my German background. I didn’t want to be anything or anywhere else in the world but a soldier in Germany. I was an American doughboy and I volunteered to crawl out at night and slit as many Hun throats as I could. I did that for two months. Two months. I don’t know how many...’
‘Ben ...’
‘No. I don’t know how many throats I cut, a hundred, probably more. You want to know how it’s done? You take your time and come up from behind ...’
Ben lifted his left hand and curled it to muffle a hundred mouths.
‘...you draw the knife sideways like this. You pull the head back to stretch the gash. You cut one more time to finish the windpipe. That keeps him from screaming. Then you stab hard into the heart from behind. You got to lay him down easy, so no one else hears you coming.’
Ben held both arms away from himself, done. He did not look at Phineas but into the crumpling air between his hands.
‘Every night, I crawled back across no-man’s-land under the barbed wire, me and a dozen others just like me. We left a few of us in the wire, but there was always another volunteer to take his place. In the dark we’d crawl past the ones laying out in no-man’s-land, we’d pat ‘em on the helmets for luck. We used to say our favorite nights to go out were in the rain. We got to come back to the line washed clean.’
‘But you weren’t.’
The young chaplain’s voice was not sympathetic. Ben saw Phineas was giving him what he needed, strength instead of coddling. God just said that to me, Ben thought, God through Phineas.
‘September 12, at dawn, we went over the top. After that, we didn’t stop for seventy-five days, every one of them under fire. Beyond St. Mihiel we were in the Argonne operation. When the Armistice came in November, we were still advancing. We took ten thousand casualties, Phineas. We were gassed, bayoneted, shot, blown up. The 90th never gave back a foot of ground. Not one.’
Ben turned the tale to his homecoming. He went back to the coal mines, his old job was waiting. His sad mother sickened and died in his first year back. Ben was twenty, a veteran, a hero, and alone.
‘Suddenly, I was an orphan. And I was a coal miner again. The two years before, the war and Mama and Papa dying, it was like I’d come through some sort of fog, and when I came out the other side I was by
myself. All of a sudden, it seemed like I’d been robbed.’
Phineas listened, saying nothing.
‘I couldn’t remember much, Phineas, not much except two years of death. That was the thing that stood out, all the dying around me. I know it sounds weird but that’s how it felt. My parents, they...they were just two more folks who’d died. I couldn’t feel them going away, not like I should have. I tried. After France ... I used to play this game in my head. I’d count the people I’d speak to in a day, just to say hello or how are you, down in the mine or up in the mess shack. They never amounted to more than the number I’d killed. Once, I tried to talk to a hundred people in one day. It wore me out, but I did it. Then I imagined I’d stabbed or shot every one of them myself. I never went back in that mine, Phineas. I had no family left, no home really, so I went off to the city, to Pittsburgh. Got a job in a steel mill. It was like working on the sun, but it was better than a coal shaft. There were folks everywhere, noise and fires, and I liked it. It made me hard again, like the Army. In 1920, my first year there, I met a Jewish girl, got married. I went to night school at Pitt.’
‘You had a son.’
‘Thomas.’
Phineas nodded, as if this were progress, having Ben say his boy’s name.
The wife did not stay long, only six years, until she met a softer man, not one out of the mines and mills but a Ford car salesman. Ben made the steel that went into that man’s cars, made the wife that clung to the salesman now, made the son the new man called his own. Ben, with no knife or gun in his hand, no mama or papa, no mate, child, or brother, was alone again.
In the mills, Ben stoked himself, trying to make his heart an ingot, the hardest he could. He finished his schooling at Pitt. On the nights he was not in classes, he drank. He did every stupid thing a young man out of war and love can do. The Depression took his job.
‘But I couldn’t leave Pittsburgh.’
Phineas said, ‘Your son.’
God did not come to Ben in one fell blow. Instead, Ben sensed God arriving in bouts, in the jabs and gouges he’d suffered since defying his father and going off to war, as though God spent fourteen years beating His way into Ben’s spirit. God came also in the form of a run-down Ford coupe his ex-wife’s husband gave him, perhaps out of pity, more likely as a way to show the contested son, Thomas, who was the better man. In 1933, Ben enrolled in the rabbinical school at Union Seminary College in Cincinnati. Every other weekend he drove three hundred miles each way to Pittsburgh to be with Thomas, never letting on that he slept in his car in warm weather and in a Squirrel Hill flophouse in winter. He worked nights in Cincinnati as a security guard. After four years, he received his rabbinical degree and became the rabbi of a small conservative synagogue in Squirrel Hill, down the street from the flophouse.
Ben reached to his breast pocket. He undid the button and took out the letter. It was too soon in the story for Thomas’s final note but Ben held it, turning the folded sheet like a slow pinwheel.
‘Those were good years,’ he said.
Phineas nodded but did not smile.
Ben tried and became a better father. The boy grew into a handsome lad, dark-haired and deep-eyed, lean and quick like his father, prudent like his mother, and in the way of all young men, passionate. Thomas came to Friday night services, where Ben watched the teenage boy dahven when he prayed, rocking with the pace of the Hebrew under his breath.
Ben unfurled the letter. ‘When he was fifteen, I started to see some of myself in the boy I didn’t like.’
‘He had a mean streak,’ Phineas said.
‘Yes.’
A few times, Thomas got in scrapes at school and with the police. He was in fights, he’d lobbed rocks into car windows, some drinking, some pranks went awry.
‘Teenage stuff,’ Ben said. ‘But underneath, there was something else, I could tell, I knew him. He wasn’t just rebelling. He didn’t just fall in with a bad crowd. There was a taste there. For trouble.’
The demons that had chased Ben away from home and into no-man’s-land now pursued his only child. Thomas read everything he could on the worsening situation in Europe. He listened to radio reports of Hitler’s speeches and Neville Chamberlain’s appeasements of the Nazis. On his eighteenth birthday, Thomas told Ben he intended to finish high school, then enlist in the Army. Ben said no, he would go to college, he would study.
‘He asked me, “What about the Jews over there? Don’t you care?”‘
‘What’d you tell him?’
‘I said what the Jews of Europe needed most from Thomas Kahn was not another soldier but another Jew, a leader of their people in America. I wanted my son to become a rabbi. “You’re Kohain,” I told him, “like me.” Turns out he was more like me than I wanted. Nothing stopped me. Why did 1 think I could stop him?’
Thomas’s mother and stepfather begged the boy not to enlist. The stepfather bribed him off with a new Ford. Thomas took the car and enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He studied aviation for eighteen months. He sold the car, quit school, and enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
By this time, Churchill and England were fighting the Germans in Africa. Hitler steamrolled across Russia. U.S. troops surrendered on Bataan. Doolittle bombed Tokyo. War had again swallowed the world.
Ben fingered the letter, making it crinkle. He began to unfold it, peeling back the top portion slowly, like a parchment. The page was thin blue. A hole had sprung in one of the creases. Ben studied the rip, careful not to make it worse.
‘The last thing I said to him, right before he left for Basic, was no. He just turned away. That was the last word I ever spoke to him, Phineas.’
He unfolded the bottom half of the letter.
Thomas’s handwriting never failed to fool Ben for a heartbeat that the boy was alive. Each inked word still bore the swirl of a pen. How easy it was for Ben to pretend that he could answer this letter, that he might still make right that moment when Thomas turned away.
He prepared the blue sheet to be read, spreading it. The rip in the crease lengthened just a bit.
Thomas was with the 95th Bomb Group, the pilot of a B-17. His twenty-second mission was over Hanover, February 25, 1943. On the way home, over France, a flight of Focke-Wulfs caught up with them and shot up his squadron. His B-17 lost a wing and exploded mid-air. The mission report said only three chutes from the ten-man crew ejected before the plane hit the ground. The tail gunner made it back to England. He didn’t know who else got out. The other nine men were listed as missing.
‘He could still be alive,’ Phineas said.
‘He could be,’ Ben answered. ‘I don’t know.’
He held up Thomas’s letter, the last known thing.
‘I got the Army’s telegram that he was MIA. A week later, I got this,’
He read aloud:
Dear Dad,
I have to make this one short. We’re taking off before sunup. I’ve been awake for a few hours now. You can sure see a lot of stars here in England, was it like that when you were here?
I know I haven’t written you much. I guess I should have. I’m sorry the way things have gone between us in the last year or so. But I’m writing you and I hope you’ll write back.
Like I said, there’s not a lot of time right now, so I’ll get right to it. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I want to tell you that you were wrong to try and keep me from joining the war. I don’t want to be a rabbi like you, I never did. Maybe I should have said this before, maybe it would have spared us both some hurt feelings and a shouting match or two, but I don’t want to live your life for you over again. I don’t want to end up in the coal mines and the steel mills when this war is over. I don’t want to end up sleeping in a car. You didn’t think I knew but I did. That’s okay, I admire you for what you’ve done, but it’s not my life, Dad. I want different things, bigger things.
We’re different, you and me, and we’re the same in a lot of ways.
There’s still a lot I ca
n learn from you and maybe I need to get better about listening to you. But you need to get better about listening to me.
With all these stars overhead, all this seems pretty far away.
For a month now we’ve been dropping bombs on German cities. We aim for the factories, but we miss, too. And all the shells the Krauts fire up at us fall on their own houses. We’re killing people left and right, and while the generals tell us that’s swell, I remember how you told me once you used to count the people you killed in France. I look at the night sky with the planes loading up and I think, We’ll kill more than there are stars up there. Like I said, we’re a lot alike, you and me. Bombing was easy at first, but it’s started getting hard. You told me it would.
David Robbins - [World War II 04] Page 28
