Misha holds still under Ilya’s inquiring gaze.
The guards continue their barrage of names and vitriol. Each man in his turn leans in to skirl another word, like snapping dogs. Ilya can only imagine the vengeful millstones these men must carry on their souls. They’re simple peasants. Freed prisoners of war. The dreaded men of the second echelon. These are the Red soldiers who’ve endured the worst of all the battles. They get no leave, rarely get paid. They’ve been bombarded by inflaming rhetoric from the Communists, prodded forward by threats from NKVD commissars. Right now they’re on their own with the enemy in their hands, and they’ve had enough. They’re stupid with rage and vendetta. Their eyes are glassy like corpses’. Hate like that kills the man and leaves the body. Ilya knows many of the places they shout, and the ones he does not recognize he understands what they represent. But Ilya has been fortunate, he’s been able to fight the Germans, to exact his toll and soothe his demons on the battlefields. These barking men have been corralled, beaten, starved, tortured by the Germans. They have debts to collect.
All but Misha. He appears very calm, almost entertained.
The bandaged little man breaks his eyes from Ilya. He spits the way the others did. He shouts over the guards. “That’s enough!”
They listen to him. Ilya leads them in battle. Misha takes the fore now in terror.
Steam issues from all the mouths on the road. The Russian screamers catch their breaths, the Germans fear these are their last breaths. Again, a crow caws from the cold bare woods.
Misha calls out, “There’s one left. For you, Ilyushka.”
Misha cocks his Luger. He says to the Germans, “Stalingrad.”
One of the Germans mutters in Russian, “Bastards.”
All of these men hate. Back and forth, volleys of loathing.
Two of the Germans reach to the ground to lift their comrade. They put the man on his feet and release him with care. He stays erect, shaking. The rest of the prisoners move by instinct closer, penned animals do the same. They do not take their eyes from the guns facing them, but every man of them backs until he can feel the shoulder of another.
One of the Russians raises his rifle to his cheek, ridiculous, as though he needs to aim this close to his targets. Ilya’s mouth is bone dry. He could speak. They listened to him in the frenzy of the citadel. He could make them listen now. He would say, what?
Another crow dispatches his voice from the trees.
Ilya turns his back.
* * * *
MARCH
* * *
W
orld history occupies a higher ground than that on which morality has properly its position, which is personal character and the conscience of individuals. . . . Moral claims which are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment. The litany of private virtues—modesty, humility, philanthropy, and forbearance—must not be raised against them.
So mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.
G.W.F. Hegel
Lectures on the
Philosophy of History
* * * *
FIVE
* * *
March 1, 1945, 11:50 a.m.
An anteroom in the House of Representatives
Washington, D.C.
P
eople bustle on all sides, checking last-minute arrangements. The President in his wheelchair looks at them from hip level. Hands in pockets, pocket watches, belted skirts, fat bellies parade past his eyes.
The President thinks about sledding.
This is his favorite dream. He is a child at Hyde Park in winter. He stands on top of a hill, pushes his sled off the peak. He picks up speed, negotiates turns, dodges trees, and outruns dogs. He is gliding, fleet and free.
More members of his staff slide by his seat. He sleds through them like they are tree trunks, turns the rudders sharply, heads out into the open fields, keeps going.
Anna walks past, brushing long fingers along his shoulder, saying nothing. Roosevelt wants her to stop and speak, to chase away his daydreaming. But she is off, arranging something for his speech in a few minutes to a joint session of Congress. His mind—the way tired minds will—wanders further, plays leapfrog to another thought. Anna did not tarry with him. His daughter, who has the widest entry of anyone into him, did not come in, she left him alone. This sends him to think on his greatest fear. The President is afraid of being alone in a burning building. He will not be able to escape on his useless legs. When he first became a paraplegic, he used to practice for hours rolling from his bed and crawling to the door to escape, in case he was alone. Sometimes he confuses his fears. Fire, or alone, which is greatest for him?
Fire. Alone. His thoughts pick up pace. Next dot. Death. Pa Watson died on the voyage back from Yalta. Cerebral hemorrhage. Had an argument with Harry, so sick himself he couldn’t leave his stateroom. Pa went back to his cabin and just stopped breathing. Major General Edwin “Pa” Watson, one of the best storytellers, poker players, and friends Roosevelt ever knew. Gone. The great alone. Harry left the Quincy in Algiers to fly home to the Mayo Clinic. He’s still there. Roosevelt spent the last part of the Atlantic trip alone, either in his cabin or on the admiral’s deck, somber in his blue cloak and gray floppy hat, watching the blue and gray sea for portents.
A new dot. Backward to Yalta. Where Pa was last alive. Where Roosevelt was with Joe and Winston, his greatest company of men, every breath and word and meal was historic. How remarkable and exhilarating! Roosevelt is going to report to Congress in another few minutes. Forward dot. He’s in his chair. His staff mills around him.
Report on Yalta to Congress. Tell them Yalta was a success, at least for America. Russia agreed to engage in the war against Japan. Russia will also join the United Nations; yes, with two extra voting seats, but that’ll be of no consequence in the long run, not when every nation on earth will be a member, what’s two more votes for the Soviets? The occupation zones were ratified. Russia gets the eastern half of Germany, the flat agricultural part, plus the eastern half of Berlin. Britain, France, and the U.S. will occupy the west of Germany, home of the country’s industry, waterways, and minerals, the better part by far. Poland—what can be done for Poland? Stalin has millions of men there. Millions more spread all over eastern Europe. Churchill wants them out. Americans don’t care. This nation’s place as the world’s greatest superpower is assured after the war, no matter what happens over there. America’s not willing to go to war with the Soviets to make them abide by their agreements in Europe. In a way, it serves the Europeans right for fighting so damned much. At least Stalin is strong enough to keep the peace. And peace is not something to be sneezed at, at any rate not by war-weary Americans who’ve been dragged against their will into European conflicts twice in consecutive generations. Anyway, Stalin is determined. The totalitarian, he’ll have his way. What can be done?
Take Berlin. That’s what Winston says. Get it first and hold it as a bargaining chip. We’ll have to back out of half the city eventually. But we can do it after some horse trading. If Stalin points at our agreement to leave part of Berlin, we can point at his agreement to leave a half-dozen other places.
The Allied attacks across the Roer have gone well. British and American troops are closing fast to the Rhine.
Winston might be right. Taking Berlin could be the way to make Stalin sit up and notice.
General Marshall says Berlin will cost an extra hundred thousand lives. It might also jeopardize Russia’s participation in the Pacific and the United Nations. And Eisenhower’s worried that Hitler might set up a resistance force in the southern mountains, which would make Berlin moot. It’s a sled ride, fast with lots of trees to miss, turns to handle.
Roosevelt smiles at the image, the roundness of his thinking.
We’ll see what develops. There’s still time.
“Time,” says Anna.
She has ap
peared right in front of him, he didn’t see her. He was on the sled the whole way, skirting through issues and memories. He rubs his forehead with a strong squeeze of his hand. The dots he connected didn’t draw anything, just a straight line away, off alone.
“Daddy,” Anna says again, ”time.”
“Yes, yes, sweetheart.” Roosevelt takes his fingers from his face and reaches to his daughter. Her touch is electric, veins and muscles marble her forearm. Roosevelt gave this woman life. It was such a good thing to do. Anna and the boys; the President can’t conceive of any other accomplishment in his life so true as bringing them into the world. You’ll hear that truth is an absolute. It’s not. Truth is a gem cut with facets—the way it appears depends on where you stand to look at it. His children, more than his presidency, are his most honest legacy. They do not rely on perspective, historians, or witnesses. Anna’s broad toothy smile is Eleanor’s, her strength is his, her charm is his. Her hand in his palm is the one absolute truth.
Today, there will be another.
For twelve years, every time Roosevelt has appeared before the nation, he has done so standing with ten-pound leg braces locked. Or seated in an open motorcar. On every occasion he has addressed Congress, he has walked down the aisle on the arm of one of his staff or relying on crutches.
Not today. As Anna said, it’s time.
Inside the chamber, the doorkeeper announces first the Justices of the Supreme Court, then the members of the Cabinet.
“The President of the United States.”
The massive doors part. Roosevelt looks into the chamber, the giant room is filled to the rafters. Rows upon rows of standing people gape back at him. Not a voice stirs.
Then there is applause, a thunderous clap. Shouts and whistles issue from the heads and hearts attending. For the first time, the President of the United States appears publicly in his wheelchair.
Through three terms and now his fourth, this has been the grand deception. The American people have not been trusted with the knowledge that their President is a crippled and vulnerable man, who cannot stand but for minutes at a time with grunting effort. The country has not been allowed to know that Secret Service men have to lift him like a doll and transfer him from chair to bed. The national press corps do not publish reports or photos of Roosevelt in his wheelchair or of his handicap. America has been permitted to believe only in a myth of a President. It is feared they would think less of him and his leadership during a Depression, then a world war. But Americans have proven their mettle. They’ve won for themselves a truth.
Anna’s hands are on his shoulders again. The applause increases.
Roosevelt pushes off the peak of the aisle. This is his dream. He glides forward.
~ * ~
* * *
March 3, 1945, 10:30 a.m.
Outside Ninth Army headquarters
Jülich, Germany
churchill bends to pick up a brick. mortar clumps cling to it, the violence of the blasts that shook it loose reside in the clay. He imagines the explosion, he tells himself he can sense the blow of shell against wall. He feels a moment of guilt; there could have been more he might have done against the events that felled this brick from its peaceful place and spun it into the street, in his path with uncountable others.
He carries the brick with him along the street. He wonders what manner of man Hitler must be, in his private moments, not the screeching demagogue. Is he insane to keep fighting? He’s surrounded, retreating. He’s being pounded day and night by American, British, and now Russian bombers. The noose closes on him east and west. Doesn’t Hitler ever pick up a fallen brick and consider, “I put this here”? Doesn’t the little corporal think, “I can stop this”? Churchill has held in his hands a thousand bricks of London, Brighton, Devonshire, Bath, but none has made him sadder than this one in Germany. The others were orphans of war. This brick smacks of waste and madness.
Churchill has not been across the German border since 1932.The devastation he sees in this river town of Jülich dismays him, though he will not show it. For the officers and men of the American Ninth strolling alongside him, the ones who wrecked this town, he smiles and congratulates them. He is chatty and upbeat. But Churchill has not viewed a single building here left untouched. Walls have been bored through as though by giant brick-eating moles. Every spire, cupola, and steeple of what must have been a lovely little town has been sheared off, no elevated havens left for snipers. Rafters and beams show under the broken skin of roofs; every house, business, and public building is skeletal. The Prime Minister sees no bodies in the rubble, they will have been removed before his visit. He sees no local residents, they will have been cordoned off. He glimpses no prisoners. But he observes what is being done to Germany, and the power of the Americans doing it.
Around him touring the conquered town are five members of his own staff, plus General William Simpson, head of the U.S. Ninth Army, two dozen neatly wrapped officers belonging to the general, and a dozen American photographers. Their street parade passes troops who take little notice, men who keep about their own business. Churchill thinks they seem marvelously comfortable in the presence of the British Prime Minister and their own officers. The Yanks seem to slouch and slink through the debris, sitting, smoking, digging out rations with bayonets, hauling ammo boxes here and there. Some wave, some fire off sloppy salutes, some call out, “Howdy, Winston.” Simpson beams at them with a paternal grin. The photographers chuckle. Churchill likes a neatly shaved face, a tucked shirttail, a proper mien, but these Americans—tired as they are—come and destroy and go home better than any soldiers in history. He lets the casualness of the fighting men go by unremarked.
Churchill leads the group around him, he does not follow, the way Simpson seems to indicate he ought. The brick has grown heavy. Churchill hands it off to an aide, telling the young man to hang on to it, he will after the war lay it in a wall at his house at Chartwell.
He meanders the group to the riverside. The buildings here are outrageously shattered. The degree of ruin from every caliber of weapon in the American arsenal is almost humorous. Structures are in heaps, brought down by bullet holes and shrapnel rents. Chasms loom where barns and warehouses were days before. Churchill clamps his cigar between his teeth. What was it like to be here facing the Americans? Such firepower. Such will to use it.
This is the tragedy of involving the Americans in Europe, Churchill thinks. They cannot be made to care what they leave behind.
He gazes over the river. Twisted beams like licorice sticks in the Roer are all that is left of the town’s lone suspension bridge, dynamited by the evacuating Germans. Empty assault boats sway on the bank a hundred meters away, beyond them is a plain of muck. The attackers had to claw through that, under a withering enemy fire. Heroes, martyrs; yes, Churchill nods, saviors. He removes the cigar from his mouth so he can swallow. Soldiers and machines now trundle across a dozen man-made bridges in an uninterrupted course, the Allied force heaves farther into the Reich. Soon the sword will be up to the hilt. Is Hitler out of his mind?
Churchill turns to Simpson. This general’s army is still attached to Montgomery’s Twenty-first. Eisenhower is making good on his word to keep Monty’s force strong and supported for his thrust. Churchill wants to hear what Simpson intends.
“General, sir. What is next on your agenda?”
Photographers slip around the two for good angles, putting the littered river in the background. Simpson is tall and handsome, with a weathered face and stern jaw. He has been chiseled out of soldier stock.
“Find a bridge, Mr. Prime Minister. Get over the Rhine.”
“And?”
Cameras click.
“And, sir, by your leave, kick some butt all the way to Berlin.”
Churchill points his cigar, a merry gesture.
“General, you pander to me. You know full well I want to hear that.”
“Yes, sir. And I wanted to say it. Ike assures me up here in the north we’re on
the best route, straight into Berlin. The Roer crossing went right on schedule. Far as I know, we’ve got the green light to go all the way. Soon as we can find us a bridge, we’re off like a shot.”
“What about the Russians? They’re only fifty miles from Berlin.”
Simpson smiles. For seconds his eyes flick to his domain, his part of Germany where he has massed three hundred thousand soldiers, trainloads of supplies, tanks, and artillery. To apply a favorite Americanism, Churchill thinks Simpson has men and weapons “coming out of his ears.” This American general is in the right place at the right time. He can do it. And if he does it, Montgomery does it.
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 21
