thank you for your frank explanation of the soviet point of view of the bern incident, which now appears to have faded into the past without having accomplished any useful purpose.
there must not, in any event, be mutual mistrust, and minor misunderstandings of this character should not arise in the future.
Ambassador Harriman asked to take out the word minor before presenting the cable to Stalin. He was concerned it might be misinterpreted in Moscow; the incident was, in Harriman’s opinion, a major one. Roosevelt insisted on leaving the message as written, wanting the episode depreciated. After drafting the Stalin message, Roosevelt sent a copy to Churchill, repeating his advice of conciliation: . . . these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out, as in the case of the Bern meeting.
The incident is over and done because Roosevelt kept a muzzle on Churchill and a firm but friendly face towards Stalin. He didn’t give in to Churchill’s rashness and exhortations to stiff-arm the Soviets, and he’s not going to now. The journey into the postwar period is about to begin. Roosevelt is committed to embark on that journey—in order to continue— peacefully.
The butler enters the room. He begins to set the table for lunch.
Roosevelt wants to end this posing session. He doesn’t like being so stationary. Too much of his life already has been robbed of motion, he doesn’t flourish with discipline and silence. Not when it’s so warm and pleasant. He wants to eat lunch, take a ride in the open car in the sunshine with his women, and have a nap.
It is very warm. He can’t sit like this much longer. He looks at his watch.
“We’ve got just fifteen minutes more.”
It’s not warm, it’s hot. A prickle runs up the back of his neck, it feels like a scuttling centipede with scorching legs. He wants to stop now but he promised fifteen more minutes.
He must be sweating. He lifts his right hand to mop his brow.
The hand will not move smoothly. It seems to flick in and out of his control. It jerks across his brow once, he tries again, another twitchy gesture.
His breath snags in his chest.
He lowers his head, to look down at his legs. You, he thinks. You. And with speeding shock he realizes, This isn’t you.
A woman’s voice. Close to his face.
He doesn’t catch what she says, doesn’t see. A fog has sprung in his head, between his eyes and his understanding. But he lifts his head. The fog is burning hot, steam.
Says, “I have a terrific pain. In the back of my head.”
Lifts his left hand to show the voice, kind concerned voice, where it hurts.
It hurts everywhere. Explosive hurt.
Opens his mouth to speak more, more, get it out, fast. Time! Memory! But the fog becomes blackness, faster than words or regret or hope.
It is horrible; then it is beautiful because everything completed is.
* * * *
NINE
* * *
April 13, 1945, 1510 hours
With the Eighty-third Division, Ninth U.S. Army
On the Elbe
Barby, Germany
B
andy squats to dig into his pack and gets a kick in the rear.
“Get moving, soldier!”
Bandy whirls to find an officer behind him with hands on hips. A .45 pistol rides just below one of the balled mitts. The man is short and red-faced.
“Whatever it is you’re doing, son, you can do it on the other side of the river!”
Bandy says nothing to the colonel. Without standing he taps a finger to his armband, the one that identifies him as a civilian in the press corps. He finishes reaching into his pack for the Leica and holds it up to the officer.
“That’s great, son. Now get your ass across the river and take some goddam pictures over there!”
The colonel strides on, shouting and boot-prodding anyone he deems sluggardly. The Rag-Tag Circus is on the Elbe. They have a shot at being the first division in the U.S. Army to cross the river. This officer makes sure every man in earshot knows it.”Get going!” he hollers at another bunch of laggards. “Don’t wait to get organized, for Pete’s sake! Get in a boat, get over the river! Come on! You’re on your way to Berlin!”
Four hours ago the Eighty-third’s convoy roared into this town of Barby on the riverbank. The central pavilion was quiet and draped in the required white sheets of surrender. Civilians stayed in their houses. There was no celebration, just as there was no resistance. All the enemy troops and Nazis had withdrawn. Once they’d retreated across the Elbe, they blew the bridge. There’s nothing left but a reef of wooden and metal rubble beneath the green water and a dozen stone stanchions standing over it all without their burden.
Bandy rode into Barby in the lead on the outrageous green fire truck. The Rag-Tag Circus likes publicity and it doesn’t get any better than Charles Bandy, life special correspondent. For the past two weeks he’s chronicled the Circus’s race eastward, neck-and-neck with their stiffest competition in the U.S. Ninth, the Hell on Wheels division, the Second Armored. The folks back in New York at Life are giving the race big play. Bandy’s photos are getting picked up by the news syndicates as well, everyone at home is on the trail with him, even with a lag time of two or three days. The hope is that one of these divisions will hit the Elbe, find a bridge across the river, and re-create the magic of the Remagen miracle, which back in March changed Allied strategy overnight. Every American and British vehicle within a hundred miles will divert and flow across, compliments of whatever division makes the discovery. According to reports, the U.S. Army now is only ten miles farther from Berlin than the Reds. The race with the Russians has turned into a dead heat.
The lumbering Second Armored actually beat the Circus to the Elbe, arriving in Magdeburg yesterday, after traveling two hundred miles through enemy territory in fourteen days. The Circus has stayed one day behind the Hell on Wheels boys, never able to catch up. Neither division found an intact bridge waiting for them. There would be no Remagen. But officers in both divisions decided they’d force the river anyway, establish beachheads on the east bank and bring up the engineers to construct all the pontoon bridges they’d need. There’s too much momentum now to be slowed down by the lack of a lousy bridge. They’ll make their own.
The Second had a day’s head start on the Eighty-third.
Last night, three battalions of the Second Armored’s infantry were ferried across the Elbe at the town of Westerhüsen, just south of Magdeburg, without opposition. On reaching the eastern bank, the soldiers dug defensive positions in a semicircle. At dawn, everything looked good and quiet.
Engineers rushed pontoon sections forward and floated them onto the Elbe. Once the morning sun rose enough, German shells came pouring in from the east side of the river. The barrage tore up the span, wounded several men, and convinced the Second to abandon this site for the crossing. They had only seventy-five more yards to go to the other side.
This morning while the Rag-Tag Circus pulled into Barby, the Second found another crossing site, just a few miles north of here. But the Circus has all the momentum now, and with shouts and officers’ boot-tips they’ve got the motors revved.
Already this afternoon one battalion has been put over in assault boats, another crosses right now. Artillery pieces float across on pontoons. A tread-way bridge is under feverish construction and should be finished by nightfall. All over the town of Barby the Rag-Tag Circus’s odd collection of green vehicles is parked haphazardly, crammed in to watch the engineers span the river, which will carry them on to the Autobahn and Berlin. So far, there hasn’t been a peep from the other side. And with the big guns floating over to help the defenders maintain their position, this bridgehead is going to hold. Bandy hears the officer patrolling the riverbank, convincing soldiers one way or another to climb into a boat and get across. Even with his butt smarting a little from the kick in the shorts, Bandy is jazzed that his gamble of joining this weird division might so
on pay off.
He loads a fresh roll of film into the Leica. His left shoulder has stopped throbbing and reduced itself to snagging his attention only when he makes a rapid move with the arm. The stitches came out of his right thigh last week; he gave the cane away. A thick gauze bandage and a lot of tape keep him aware that he’s been shot. He hasn’t mentioned the bullet to Victoria in any letters. He’ll let her wait for that one. Judging from the look of the progress on the river in front of him, all the crazy vehicles rammed into Barby, the determination on the men’s faces, the competition between divisions hitting the river, the power of those combined forces, and that sign still hanging on the Circus’s fire truck claiming berlin as the last stop, Vic won’t have to wait long.
Bandy stands. The leg feels fine and he consigns it with the shoulder to his subconscious. All healed. Good as new. He straps the ready Leica around his neck, grabs his pack, and heads to the bank to find a spot in a boat, to cross the Elbe with the Eighty-third Infantry. This sort of thing makes not a caption but a headline: “Bandy Across the Elbe.”
He walks down to the bank. There he squeezes off a dozen shots of eight-man boats plying the last natural barrier between the Americans and Berlin. The water and the afternoon are churned by the motors shuttling to and fro. On the far bank, men are shoved out of the boats even before they hit the shore so the skiffs can turn and run hard to fetch another load of passengers. Two big guns are floating on pontoon platforms, being towed against the current by three straining assault boats each. Twenty or more engineers—the most inventive and resilient of soldiers, Bandy has observed—have got the footbridge a fifth of the way across. The mood of the Rag-Tag Circus is merry, actually a carnival-like atmosphere befitting their nickname, a three-ring jubilee of activity to cross the Elbe. The men really want to get to Berlin. At the moment nothing, not Germans or nature or orders, is stopping them.
Today is Friday the thirteenth. Bandy wonders what’s going to go wrong.
He stows his camera, jots a few caption ideas on a notepad. He raises a hand like hailing a taxi and in seconds one of the boats has a place for him. Bandy has to get his boots wet climbing in, there’s no time for the boat to come up on shore. He sloshes over the side and the skipper whirls in a tight turn even before Bandy is seated.
The ride over is smooth and quick. The day around them is pleasant, there’s no trace of threat, the river wake is frothy and clean, this could be an excursion with friends were it not for the guns and helmets. Bandy crosses the Elbe and when the boat slows he steps into the shallows with the rest. The boat pivots on its engine and is gone, as though this is one big river relay race.
He walks up to the shore. Bandy takes out the Speed Graphic this time. He wants to shoot faces and hands, the thousand soldiers in the vanguard of the deepest American penetration of the war into Germany.
He unfolds the accordion bellows of the camera, clicks the lens in place, slides in a film packet, and searches for a shot. Once this bridgehead is solidified and the span across the river complete, it won’t take long for a formidable force to transport across the river. The two battalions of the Eighty-third that have been ferried across so far throw dirt in the air with shovels, picks, even helmets used as trenching tools. They burrow into the German earth, knowing the enemy may come to throw them back. They will not go back easily out of these holes and revetments, not a one of them wants to return across the river without first seeing Berlin.
Bandy wanders through the men, freezing time among them with his camera, they will be here forever digging like this, heroic and cheerful and young. Some sing with their mates while they excavate. Almost every man smokes, sportily, like movie stars playing soldiers with cigarettes dangling from sweaty lips, and Bandy feels good that he is a farmer for them too.
A lieutenant with freshly wet calves from his drop-off in the Elbe approaches Bandy. He does not bear on his shoulders the enthusiasm of the rest of the men, there’s something else there.
Here it comes, Bandy thinks. Friday the thirteenth. Never fails.
“Sir. Mr. Bandy, sir.” The young officer doesn’t seem to know how to address him.
“Yes, Lieutenant. What can I do for you?”
“Sir, I don’t know if you know.”
“Know what?”
“Word is that yesterday, President Roosevelt died.”
Bandy narrows his eyes and grimaces. This is sad damn news, he thinks. Rotten timing for the old man. Shitty. Just when we’re standing here so close. No one wants to die this near to the end. He should’ve gotten to see it. He should’ve been able to live long enough.
Well, so should a lot of people.
“How?”
“They say he just keeled over. Down in Georgia. Just up and died.”
The lieutenant nods when Bandy says nothing more. The man turns to go. Bandy sits on a rock. The heavy Speed Graphic gets lowered to the ground. Bandy takes off his helmet and rubs a hand through his hair, scratching the back of his head.
FDR’s gone. Bandy drops his emptied hands into his lap. He works his fingers, trying to feel the real shape of the loss, but what he feels instead is the weight of his cameras, the pictures he’s taken and the dangerous places he’s trod himself, the frames of the dead, and the millions of men striving to survive. He thinks about their sacrifices and risk, and his own, and compared to it all, Roosevelt’s passing kind of pales. That’s not right, Bandy thinks, not fair, the man was the President for thirteen years, he brought America out of the Depression, guided us through the war.
What’s missing, what refuses inside Bandy to give the President’s passing its proper due? Bandy uses his eyes to search for the answer. He tries hard but what he sees instead is anonymous soldiers burrowing into enemy ground, men rushing across a river in hopes of taking a hostile city. He sees men in danger in a foreign land, far away from home and loved ones. Men who have lost dearer friends than Roosevelt, who have not finished their mission. Bandy counts himself among them. There’s work left to be done by these men and Bandy. They are all dispensable to that work. The answer comes: Roosevelt is too.
Bandy dons his helmet. He watches the word spread among the digging men. They stop to hear the news. Many do as Bandy did, take off their helmets and scratch their heads with dirty hands. Most go back to work after a respectful pause, a few walk over to the next group to tell them. The men are all sorry but not stymied. This isn’t a crisis for them, Bandy thinks, it’s a death, and that is woefully familiar.
Before dark, the treadway bridge is finished. At dusk, the large pontoon span is completed. Another thousand men cross to solidify the bridgehead. Green tanks rumble over to add their might to the defense. The Rag-Tag Circus now straddles the Elbe.
Bandy catches a ride with an assault boat back across the river, to deliver his exposed film to the liaison officer for a flight to London in the morning.
On the west bank he pulls out the Leica for one last series of shots of the fat pontoon bridge. In the gloaming the Leica will let him shoot faster than the Speed Graphic before dark falls. A truck rumbles over the slats, the pontoons bounce on the moody water in the fading day. Bandy moves to the approach of the bridge, to photograph the span in retreating perspective with the truck on it.
He includes in his frame a sign nailed in place by the men of the Eighty-third. They have named their bridge, the first and only American bridge across the Elbe, with the typical panache of the Rag-Tag Circus. In honor of the new President of the United States, the sign reads: truman bridge. gateway to berlin. courtesy of the 83RD infantry division.
~ * ~
* * *
April 14, 1945, 2:15 p.m.
Goethe Strasse
Charlottenburg, Berlin
freya sits in the hall, her back against the wall. she slumps, legs akimbo in front of her. Her dress rides above her slim knees. Mutti on the floor looks to Lottie like a woman who has been knocked there.
Lottie stands back, arms folded, leaning in the doorjamb
. She sees the loss of weight in herself now showing on Mutti’s arms and calves. There hasn’t been much to eat since the horsemeat ran out. The stuff was easier to stomach than Lottie would have thought. Freya cooked it into jerky and sausage, soaking the meat in salted water before frying out all the bacteria and rot, then heavily seasoning it to stave off the taste of spoilage. After a week the stores were gone. Freya, as Lottie expected, brought food into the bunkers to hand out to neighbors, old folks, and children.
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 39
