The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02]

by David L. Robbins

  Simpson has toted up his strength. It is indeed mammoth, equal to the job.

  “Mr. Prime Minister, I say good luck to ‘em.”

  Churchill pats the general on the back. He has to reach up to hit the man between the shoulder blades.

  On the way back to Ninth Army headquarters, billeted in the remains of the town hall, Simpson tells Churchill about his two recent attempts to take a bridge.

  After the Roer crossing, the main force of Ninth Army met only token resistance. The Germans were scattered and making for the Rhine themselves. Just last night, March second, a group of Simpson’s tanks sped into the small town of Neuss, across the Rhine from the industrial city of Düsseldorf. To the tankers’ shock, one major bridge was left intact over the river. Without waiting for orders, they rushed to get across, figuring they could hold it long enough to call for reinforcements and establish a bridgehead. Three of the tanks were on the span when German engineers blew it.

  Later the same night, the commander of Simpson’s 330th Infantry put into effect an idea he had. It was the same trick that Americans executed German prisoners for trying in reverse during the Battle of the Bulge. The 330th painted out the white stars on their tanks and applied German crosses and camouflage. They put German-speaking GIs in the turrets in Wehrmacht uniforms and headed off for the Rhine bridge at Oberkassel. At the approach to the bridge a sentry challenged the column. The tanks roared past and fought their way right to the foot of the bridge. An alarm sounded and the span was exploded with the American tanks growling at the edge of the river.

  Simpson assures Churchill, “We’ll get one.”

  Returning to Ninth Army HQ, Churchill forges a different path through the town. The desolation he sees throughout Jülich is complete. The dozen photographers take their shots, jogging ahead and alongside like hunting dogs. Churchill flashes his famous V several times. It’s important to be seen at the front. To let the free world witness him here, one of the Big Three with the troops. Stalin stays behind the Byzantine domes and minarets of his Kremlin walls, not even his own people catch sight of him. And Roosevelt cannot possibly make this sort of tour. Churchill displays his famous cigar. The cameras click. Today he wears a green campaign waistcoat with epaulets, riding breeches, high leather boots, and a general’s billed cap. Last night while the American tanks were prowling the Rhine for a bridge, the Prime Minister had dinner with Montgomery. This morning he visits Ninth Army, then it’s off to see the vaunted Siegfried Line. He’ll spend the night on Eisenhower’s train at Geldrop in Holland. Tomorrow he’ll review the First Canadian Army. Sleep the night on Ike’s train, awake in Reims for a chat with the good Supreme Commander. Keep the fires stoked for the march on Berlin. Show the colors; flash the V; Advance, Britannia! and all that.

  Once the party is near Ninth Army HQ, the photographers drift away. Churchill sends them off with a “Cheerio!” He crosses the street with Simpson to enter the shattered town hall. On the steps to the building sits a gaunt man with a battered khaki sack in his lap. The fellow’s uniform bears no insignia, but beside him on the steps is the worn leather case of a Speed Graphic camera.

  This one is not part of the pack, Churchill thinks, stopping in the street. This one hunts alone.

  The man is narrow-shouldered and long of bone. He stands with a laconic grace, leaving the sack on the steps. The bulky camera hangs from his mitt. He looks more dog-tired than most of the soldiers.

  “General Simpson.” The photographer approaches, greeting the general. “May I ask a favor of your esteemed guest?”

  Simpson holds up a halting hand.

  “Charley, the Prime Minister here has done all the photo ops he’s gonna do for today. You had your chance to join in with the rest.”

  “Yes, sir.” The photographer smiles at Churchill. The green tape above his pocket reads: bandy.

  “You are Charles Bandy.”

  “Yessir, Mr. Prime Minister.”

  The man’s voice is that wonderful Yank twang, honey in tea, mint.

  “That would be Life magazine Bandy?”

  “Yessir.”

  Churchill chomps his cigar. This is one he has heard of. A tobacco farmer in his other life. Churchill honors anyone and anything to do with that splendid leaf. And his magazine is at the top. Life gives this man’s work full spreads. He’s a favorite of the American soldiers, like that marvelous writer Ernie Pyle. Bandy shares their load, their danger. Their exhaustion. He’s done a lot for the war effort.

  “What do you propose, Mr. Bandy?”

  “If you’d step over here, sir. I’ll show you.”

  The photographer leads the whole entourage around to the rear of the town hall. He walks slumped, the camera dangling from his hand like a burden. Behind the hall a square opens, where once market stalls may have stood. In every direction is the same utter devastation Churchill has observed throughout Jülich. But this he did not see. A sign.

  Churchill walks up to it alone. He beams broadly; yes, he wants to have his picture taken before it. Clever man, this Bandy. One picture he will take, not dozens like the others. And this one will be the cream, telltale of irony and wit. Life will love it. The British papers will likely grab this as well.

  The sign has been posted by some clever bilingual GI. It reads: gebt mir funf jahre und ihr werdet deutschland nicht wieder erkennen.

  Beneath these words are the English translation:

  give me five years and you will not recognize germany again.

  Signed, Adolf hitler.

  Churchill gives Bandy the V. The photographer shakes his head, no. Hmm, Churchill thinks. Cheeky as well.

  “Just say cheese, Mr. Prime Minister.”

  The boxy Speed Graphic creaks and it is done. Bandy approaches with his hand out in thanks.

  Churchill shakes the hand. The man’s fingers are long, slender, artistic digits. His eyes are old and crinkled by too much squinting, probably not under sun but under too many whizzing bullets.

  “Mr. Bandy, sir. May I offer you some advice in return?”

  “Please.”

  “Go home.”

  General Simpson hears this and seems to snigger, as though this is a ridiculous thing to suggest.

  The photographer snaps the Speed Graphic into its worn case, like a turtle.

  “Why does everybody tell me that?”

  “I suppose because it’s rather disturbing to see a man who doesn’t have to be here ... well, be here.”

  The photographer shuffles in the dirt for a moment. He looks up at the sign and speaks.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, sir, but you don’t have to be here.”

  “Well, no.” Churchill doffs his general’s cap. He runs his hand through the wisps of his once-red hair, now gray and desolate.

  Churchill continues. “But you realize that while many men are called forth by their draft board, some of us are summoned by . . . other, greater forces. Those unlucky few of us who are singled out must be present no less than the rest.”

  Charles Bandy actually lays his hand on the Prime Minister’s shoulder. It is an act of uncommon familiarity, even for a Yank. But there’s a wonderful comradeliness about the gesture, a draw in the pressure of his hand, and a sadness about the lines in his face, a tale or two there. Churchill wishes he could linger to read them.

  The man says, “Me too, sir. Just the same.”

  Churchill layers his hand over Bandy’s resting at his shoulder. The two men clasp that way.

  He nods, pats Bandy’s wrist once, and takes his leave.

  Joining General Simpson, Churchill looks past his shoulder to watch Bandy saunter away. With acute sadness, the Prime Minister thinks, Damn. There is another brick. Blasted out of its peaceful, rightful place by war.

  ~ * ~

  * * *

  March 5, 1945, 11:50 p.m.

  Savigny Platz bomb shelter

  Charlottenburg, Berlin

  the poison goes everywhere with lottie.

  She keeps th
e caplets in her pocket. In idle moments she slips her hand in and plays with them, juggling them between her fingers like coins. At night they rest under her pillow. During concerts they’re in her tuxedo. She has even put one, plastic packet and all, in her mouth for a second, daring herself, sucking it, then taking it out lest the cyanide seep through the wrapper. The pill on her tongue scared her; it had no weight at all. It was nothing; at the same time it was everything.

  Tonight in the shelter beneath a dry goods store on the Kant Strasse, Lottie fondles the pills, the secrets of power in her pocket. Every one of the women down here is known to the others. The talk is frank. One woman, a dressmaker, drones tirelessly about the horrors she has heard related by refugees from the East. Lottie has no reason to disbelieve the woman; they match tales she herself has heard. In Poland and in German border towns, husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers have been made to hold lanterns while their women are raped by entire squads of Soviet soldiers. Those local men who resist are shot or castrated. Women who put up too much of a fight are knifed, even gutted. Soviet machine guns have borne down on refugee caravans, slaughtering fleeing innocents, horses, and livestock. Babies are found with heads bashed in. Children are forced to clear mines. Old militiamen are doused in gasoline and torched. Lottie, Freya, and the ten other ladies endure the woman’s stories, told as though she were speaking to tykes, working her hands and tone, foolish, as if these atrocities need added dramatics. Some of the women in the bunker offer their own versions but the dressmaker always trumps them with another, greater, inhumanity.

  The pills have become for Lottie an armor. The stories do not pierce her skin the way they might have two weeks ago. She does not see herself captive and spoiled like the terrorized people in the refugee accounts. The pills give her the capacity to escape such fates, and to free Mutti as well. She no longer feels any fear. Lottie already has put the cyanide once in her mouth. She can do it again. All she has to do is first tear away the plastic, and bite down. A simple act. Nothing, really. And everything.

  “There are two and a half million people in Berlin right now,” the woman goes on. She points a shaking finger upward like a preacher, not to heaven but through the earth to the wretched dark city above. “Two million of those are women. The rest are doddering old men who haven’t held more than a garden rake in forty years and now they’re being handed rifles. And boys.” The woman shoots out a hand like a scythe, cutting the air only feet from the plank floor. “Boys, on bicycles, with Panzerfausts against tanks! These are the ones expected to defend us! Berlin!”

  In her pocket Lottie rolls a pill between finger and thumb. Like a button, but one you push with your teeth. Then it’s over. You’re protected.

  Tonight Berlin is not the Amis’ target. After three hours in the bunker, the all-clear sirens wail. Lottie moves first. She lugs her cello case up the steps; she can’t help it, she begins to hate the instrument just a little. It is so big and unwieldy, demanding, unlike the little pills, her new favorite possessions. Pulling the case up the steps, the hard shell bumps on the treads. Freya offers to carry the cello but Lottie shakes her mother off. Lottie is not tired, no. That isn’t the reason she is careless. The Galiano is her biggest anchor to this life, and she begrudges it.

  Out in the street, there is a choice of two scenes always played out in Berlin following an alert. One is after an actual raid, and there is a firestorm and dust, bodies, stench, and loss, frantic running, intense noise, wailing, and heroism. The other option is the quiet plodding back to whatever Berlin-ers have left to them as a life and a home, hefting back whatever loads they bring into the shelters with them time after time: luggage, briefcases of papers and probably jewels, paintings, sleeping infants slung over shoulders. When the all-clear klaxon quits, the night murmurs with dragging feet and skidding steamer trunks. People head home gray and slumped, like ghouls making for their graves before sunup. The cyanide in her pocket cannot free Lottie from this drudgery, things aren’t yet bad enough to warrant taking a pill. She almost longs for the coming time when life will become too terrible to live, when the decision makes itself.

  On the way back to Goethe Strasse, Lottie and Freya do not talk. There has been less and less to say between them in the past weeks. Freya spends a great deal of time out of the house trying to obtain food. The rations she can get with their two cards have been cut twice more this month. The third mouth in the basement keeps them all on starvation’s cusp. Lottie’s string quartet hasn’t played in two weeks. The BPO hasn’t met payroll in three weeks. There is little household money, and what there is gets devoured by Freya’s scant purchases of black-market food. Lottie spends her days lying in bed, or playing the cello. She has run out of makeup, shoe polish, toothpaste, a hundred little thorns prick her life every day.

  She plays her cello, but she does not play for Mutti or the Jew. She doesn’t admit that she plays for anyone or any reason, it simply feels automatic to take the Galiano between her legs and spend her day. In her heart she expects to die, and there is so much music still in her that she gives in to a deep urgency to get it out before she is gone. She is discharging a responsibility. For hours she sits on the parlor sofa and plays. To her own ear she has never performed better, though she plays with disdain.

  The BPO continues its schedule, three and four concerts per week, right through the end of April when the season will officially end. The men of the orchestra are restive, not knowing their fate. Rumor has it that the young violinist, concertmaster Taschner, went to Minister Albert Speer for help. Speer has promised to do something; already it’s whispered that he’s dispatched an officer on his staff to the draft board to secretly extract and destroy all the musicians’ papers. But this ploy won’t stop Reichschancellor Goebbels for long. If the little clubfoot sets his sights on an epic end for Berlin, he’ll see to it that all share in the fall.

  Reaching Freya’s house, Lottie leaves the cello in the front hall. She hauls herself up the steps to her room. It’s after one in the morning. The house is chilly. Freya goes to the parlor to stir the fireplace ashes. Lottie hears her mother clanking the iron tools and shoveling on coal. Upstairs she takes off only her shoes and climbs under the covers.

  Downstairs the front door opens. It closes with a quiet pressure. Footsteps trickle along the hallway. Freya says something to someone. Lottie springs up on the edge of the mattress.

  The Jew.

  He was outside! During the air raid alert!

  Lottie rips away the blanket. She tears down the steps, swinging on the newel post at the bottom.

  She flies past Freya.

  The basement door closes.

  “You!” She points at the yellow door as though the Jew could see the accusing finger. “You left the house!”

  Freya drops the fireplace tool. She comes down the hall.

  “Lottie.”

  “No, no! This is unbearable.”

  Lottie turns again to the basement door. These wooden panels, flat and wide and flimsy, have become the Jew’s face and body for her, they are all she sees of him.

  Not looking away from the yellow boards, she addresses Mutti. “He went outside the house. That’s against the law. What if he’s caught? What if he’s seen? The Gestapo will follow him back here! Then what happens to us, Mutti, tell me that.”

  Freya moves to stand close to her daughter. Lottie pulls away but her mother’s hands on her shoulders hold her in place.

  She whispers, “Nothing happens to us, Liebchen. He went for a walk. He’s careful, he promises he’s careful, always. He doesn’t go far. Just outside, to sit in a dark spot and see the stars. He stays out of sight. No one can stay in that basement without ever breathing some fresh air. It’s asking too much. Too much.”

  Lottie’s mouth goes slack. The notion shocks her.

  “I’m asking too much of him?”

  She speaks her first words in a month, since she demanded he go away, to the Jew behind the door.

  “I’m asking
too much of you?”

  Lottie brushes her mother’s fingers from her shoulders.

  He’s right there, on the top stair, just behind the yellow door, listening. He says nothing to explain or defend himself. He makes no sound, not even a creak.

  During every air raid, he strolls in the night. He ducks the police and SS. He hurries to get back before Lottie returns. Does he understand the danger his walks could bring to the good women who hide him? If he did, he wouldn’t risk the stupid indulgence of stars and fresh air.

  When the police or the SS spot him—and they will—he’ll lead them here.

  This is unbearable.

  Lottie grabs her mother’s forearm. She tows Freya away to the parlor, shutting the door to the hall.

  “Mutti.”