One of the SAJ—a young man she'd noticed jotting entries in a ledger— turned to her and spoke in careful, almost too-polite English. “Käthe tells us that you are from Washington come?”
“You come from Washington,” a second boy corrected him, the dark-eyed one who'd given her the soup.
Martina smiled and nodded, to assure them that either phrasing was fine.
“I think that it is a beautiful city,” said the first boy. “Not like Berlin. Berlin is a great city but ugly. Like Chicago. Do you know Chicago?”
“No, I'm afraid not.”
“Over Chicago Brecht has written,” the boy said. “A real workers' city. Like Berlin, big and dirty, but so full of life! The people, warm and true.”
“Do you know Berlin?” Dark Eyes said.
Martina shook her head. “I've never been anywhere in Germany. Only here. And the train from Hamburg.”
There was quiet murmuring as this was translated and Martina felt somehow inadequate. These people were just so… good. So calm and sure and open to knowledge in all its forms.
“I think Germany's a beautiful place,” she said hastily. “I'd love to see more of it. I wish I could just, you know, wander around, like you all do.”
Hearing herself say it, she decided it was true. She wanted to cast off the constraints of college and home, a life scheduled down to the minute, and strike out along these enticing forest paths.
“If you wish that,” said Käthe, from her place halfway around the fire, “why should it not be?”
“Does the SAJ,” Martina said, awkwardly assembling her question, “just camp out anywhere? Do you have regular places, or…”
“We have a main home,” Dark Eyes said. “It is not so far from here, a place called the Leuchtenburg, near Jena. And we have a project in the East, a model village. There is a little farm there, and an artisans' workshop. We make everything for ourselves.”
“But our chief work is in the cities,” Käthe said. “Organizing among the working-class youth. Helping at soup kitchens, setting up libraries. This is our first duty, to serve and unite the ordinary people.”
Her voice had an edge, and Martina wondered if she was annoyed that the boy had mentioned these other, less-serious-minded matters.
“But you must come to Leuchtenburg!” Dark Eyes persisted. “Always guests are welcome there. It is a lovely old place, with a wonderful legend. A knight of the Holy Reich took refuge there, pursued by pagan bandits—”
“Na ja,” said Käthe, clearly annoyed now. “Just the sort of tale the Weisse Ritter like to tell. Armored aristocrats dashing about subduing the peasantry, crusaders sticking their lances through infidels.”
The boy only smiled; this argument had a rote quality, its themes probably oft-repeated. “It is only a tale, you know,” he confided to Martina. “Unlike the White Knights, and some other bündisch people we could name, we SAJ do not believe in old legends, though we may freely take pleasure in them. We do not believe either in new legends, as the Marxists do. We don't even believe in Wagner!”
There was laughter around the fire, and Martina dearly wished she got the joke, that she could be just another good, honest Socialist. When I get back to Washington, she promised herself, I'll take an interest in politics, figure out how the world works. And then I'll do something about it— mark my words.
Caught up in these thoughts, Martina was probably the last to notice the strange noises coming from the other side of the camp. Somewhere beyond the tent, off in the shadows, there was a scuffling, like a heavy object being dragged over rocks. Then a tumble, something falling or being thrown to the ground. Finally voices: two at least, male, cursing or laughing, possibly both. As the sounds got closer, a few Arbeiterjugend slipped away into the darkness like soldiers preparing to meet an unseen foe. Martina moved to follow them, but Dark Eyes held her back.
“Before, we have had trouble. People have been hurt.”
At last the source of the commotion came lurching into the wavering circle of firelight: Isaac, his face begrimed and clothing torn, his hair askew, blood-slick gashes running down one bare arm. His eyes shone with fevered brightness as he stared back and forth, like a child waking from a dream and trying to recognize the faces swarming around him.
Then, to everyone's amazement, he began to laugh. His mouth opened wide and the laughter was that of a wild creature of the woods. He took a step forward, nearly lost his balance and had to be jerked upright by the young man beside him. This second boy didn't look crazed, though he too was a shambling mess, his clothing soiled, his hat knocked sideways. Mar-tina's first thought was that he must be some German kind of Eagle Scout: he had the stiff, clenched-jawed look of someone working extra hard to win that merit badge. Her next thought was that the boy holding Isaac on his feet was Ingo.
Ingo it was, wearing a hat she'd never seen before, some silly loden thing with a feather poking out of it, and an unfamiliar peasant-style smock that was torn and stained. Ingo the timid bookworm from Brook-land. Ingo the Dull and Predictable.
“Isaac!” someone shouted—Käthe, Martina dimly thought. “Bist okay? Bist du verletzt?”
“Verletzt?” Again the crazy laugh. “Injured? Nie—ich wäre tot. I thought I was a fuckin' goner.”
Ingo led him forward, one stumbling footfall at a time. A German boy grabbed the opposite arm and together they carried him to the fire.
When Isaac saw Martina, his marble eyes sparkled. “I met another Yank!” His voice was unreasonably loud, the voice of someone who'd had a close shave and lived to tell about it. “This guy here, Ingo Miller, he's a fucking hero. I'm serious—this Arschficker saved my life.”
NEAR STARY SAMBOR
OCTOBER 1944
War, thought Butler, is Tolstoyan: it obeys the formula laid down in Anna Karenina, the famous passage about families. Every successful military operation is more or less the same, but disaster comes in limitless variety.
Sometimes the problem unfolds gradually, over weeks or months, with ever more depressing clarity, like the Eskimo technique for killing a bear by feeding it sharpened bones in blubber, so that it bleeds slowly to death from inside. That's how the annihilation of Hitler's army in the East was proceeding, from the German point of view.
Other times, trouble leaps upon you so fast you have no time even to imagine what went wrong—rather as though munitions engineers had fed the bear an armor-piercing explosive. That's how the war felt to Butler this morning. That little click in the gut, just before the boom.
After five years as a front-line correspondent—six if you count the dress rehearsal in Spain, months devoted largely to screwing, reading Cavafy and smoking hashish—Butler had come to feel about the war as an experienced, intuitive mechanic might feel about a high-powered engine. He could clear his mind and gently touch the keys of his modified Remington, and the living pulse of the war would come throbbing into his fingertips. He could tell when the great, ravening machine was running smoothly. He could sense the changes in rhythm when it was roaring ahead or chugging wearily to a halt. He needed no inside source at Front HQ to tip him off to a new offensive: he could read it in the grinding teeth of motorized traffic, the whine of aircraft overhead, the tense, excited faces of young staff officers with secret orders behind their eyes.
Butler knew when a battle was going well from his bedroll, hearing the rolling thunder of artillery, the gentle shudder of the earth under advancing tank columns, the electric crackle of radios as messages came through. Just so, he could tell at once when the great engine faltered, when something got stuck, a connector snapped, an artery gushed blood. He felt it, somehow, in his own flesh: a sick churning in the belly, a tightening at the throat. A dry hacking of field guns. A silence when there ought to have been noise.
He was lying in bed this morning, an hour past dawn, wrapped in a bearskin blanket in his cozy bivouac near the railroad junction at Stary Sambor, a town that might have been in Poland or Galicia or the Ukraine, depend
ing on when you drew the line. Today, in the autumn of 1944, this was Soviet territory. So why were the guns firing?
His head ached and his knee throbbed from having been twisted hard a couple days previously, as he crawled in or out—he was drunk at the time—of the political officer's tent. The politruk was angry because Butler, in connivance with his new pal Seryoshka, had snagged a private bunker: a neatly excavated little den with birch-log walls and a ceiling covered with turf to keep the rain out. The Wehrmacht built such things when it went over to the defensive, and once made they were damned hard to destroy. The politruk, not a popular guy—in point of fact an asshole—had been assigned a low round yurt. It was warm enough, double-layered in sheep's hide, but prone to blow over, especially when its stakes had been loosened by subversive elements among the lower ranks. By virtue of its roominess it had become a popular gathering spot for battalion staff officers, who liked to keep the politruk in their line of sight. Hence Butler's throbbing knee and a head that, pain withal, felt much too terribly clear.
“Good morning, comrade,” Seryoshka said from across the musty little space. Dawn light streamed through crevices angled away from what, during the German tenancy, had been the front; since then the sides had changed and the light slits now faced the wrong direction, offering a glimpse of the Carpathians. Werewolf country. Nasty things crawled through the woods out there.
“What's happening?” Butler said groggily. “What is that shooting about?”
Seryoshka was bent over lacing his boots and probably had been awake for hours. Some nights he hardly slept, especially when a battle was in progress. Other times, he could hibernate for days. “A limited action, they say. Advance along a narrow front. Who knows? Maybe they're straightening the lines before the freeze. Or just keeping the Huns off balance. You know the sort of thing.”
Butler knew. Small-scale movements, which seldom affected the reconnaissance battalion, had become standard Red Army procedure in this latter stage of the war. Now that the Germans were essentially non-mechanized, owing to lack of fuel and deteriorating equipment, Soviet commanders liked to keep things mobile along the sharp edge—obliging their foes continually to adjust their positions, burn a little more petrol, fire off a few more shells. Maintain the pressure, was the general idea; don't give the enemy time to catch his breath. We can breathe during peacetime, Zhukov's political officer, a man named Khrushchev, had famously said. Today, we fight.
“Where are you off to?” asked Butler.
“To Division. Pay a call on our friends over there. Catch up on the news.”
Butler unwrapped himself from the bearskin. “Wait for me.”
If Front Headquarters was a floating city, then Division HQ was one of its smaller industrial suburbs. There was nothing to it, really, except for the offices of core divisional staff, housing for support troops, radio and encryption facilities, a maintenance shed, a galley and the usual comic opera of Red Army logistics, a production with more of Groucho Marx than Karl about it. The division commander was a one-star general, recently assigned, and Butler had yet to take his measure. Seryoshka's “friends” were on the operations side, field men kicked up to headquarters, not often happy to be there. A sturdy lot.
The pair of them crossed the encampment and stepped quietly into the command post, sited in what was left of a schoolhouse. You would expect such a place—the brain of the fighting organism—to be a scene of purposeful frenzy, but effective brains are not frenzied, and a working CP often falls, at the pitch of fighting, eerily quiet.
So it was this morning. From the hall where Butler and Seryoshka stood, you could look into the operations center, which reminded Butler— such places always did—of newsrooms he'd known. It was dominated by a huge table on which maps and manuals and field reports and decrypted dispatches were arranged in an order apparent only to the men who needed them. Around this, ordinary slate boards smudged with chalk provided a continually updated accounting of unit strength and disposition. Except for the uniforms, the scene might have been taken for a wearisome gathering of the Math Department at a grubby provincial college.
The senior staff was present en masse. The division commander sat immersed in paper at the head of the table, chewing a cigar and swearing calmly under his breath. His ops deputy hunched beside him, grunting into a field telephone. The political officer sat opposite, doing nothing in particular; ostensibly an advisor, a helpful emissary of the Party, he provided by his mere presence a reminder of the stakes they were playing for. Heads were going to roll, if not Fascist then Red ones. The selection of heads on offer—the tank man, the infantry specialist, the logistics chief and so forth—sat in their designated spots, according to a seating arrangement standard throughout the Red Army. Sundry junior staff huddled near their bosses, while along the wall couriers stood at the ready to run dispatches or fetch more coffee. From an adjoining room you could hear a platoon of clerks aggressively engaged in the battle of the typewriter— one of the few theaters in which they were still outclassed by the enemy.
Cautiously, Seryoshka led them to a chart table just inside the door, where a trio of aides-de-camp quarreled sotto voce over a situation map. Preparing these entailed reconciling numerous, often conflicting status reports from subordinate commands engaged in battle, some of whom inevitably had gotten things wrong, while others, caught up in this and that, had not made contact for several hours. The present task was mostly finished; the only point in dispute being where to place a red block identifying a certain infantry formation. Either this side of the river or the other—it couldn't be both.
“Put the damn thing anywhere,” growled the captain in charge. “Flip a fucking coin. The comrade general is waiting.”
Looking smug, as though he personally were responsible for the collapse of German resistance, a peach-faced lieutenant affixed the unit in question to the farther bank. The captain nodded curtly and the map was rushed over to the big table, where the assembled officers pounced on it like so many night editors when a hot dispatch comes off the wire.
“Someone explain to me, please,” General Krivon said loudly, with a thump on the table, “what the hell is going on out there. This makes no sense at all.”
An anxious look crossed the captain's face, but his commander's dissatisfaction seemed to concern something larger than the map per se. The whole damned operation, for example.
“Something's gone wrong, hasn't it?” said Butler.
Seryoshka made a quick motion—Keep quiet—though nobody at the big table seemed to have heard. The captain, a pal of Seryoshka's from somewhere, whispered, “What makes you say that?”
Butler shrugged. “I've been hearing artillery all morning. Why hasn't it stopped by now? What are they shooting at?”
The captain took on a shrewd look, seeming to suspect Butler of being privy to closely guarded secrets. In a cautious voice he said, “The fire-control reports are inconclusive. It would appear the targets have been knocked out. But then—you know how it is. Until definite information is received…”
Butler considered this, trying to connect it with the vague unease that had troubled him all morning. Ideas swirled in his mind, barely out of reach, known facts and wild conjectures mingling chaotically. It was like the moment when, upon sitting down to write a story, you reach into a maelstrom of words and fish out the perfect lead. Suddenly, it's there.
“The reports are inconclusive, you said. You mean you've had no reports at all. Not for a while now. Your forward fire-control observers are out of contact. Is that it?”
The captain's lips tightened; he seemed to be resisting an urge to respond.
“Don't you see what this means?” said Butler.
He must have spoken too loudly, because in the subsequent silence he heard his own words ringing across the room. Abashed, he looked around to see the whole operations staff staring back at him. General Krivon— flicking cigar ash on the floor—said with teeth-grating courtesy, “What does this mean, comrade?
I would dearly love to know.”
Butler had spent time enough with the Red Army to understand that at moments like this you didn't try to be diplomatic. The old man got enough diplomacy from his underlings. He was asking you, ordering you, to answer in plain words.
“This means you're in deep shit, Comrade General.”
Into the vacuum of shock, Butler moved a step toward the command table. He knew he was playing a role—Gogol's yurodivy, the village fool, speaking truths no one else dares even to think—and that having taken it up he must now play it wholeheartedly. In the same cocksure manner he went on, “This means the Germans have taken out your forward observers. They've blinded you. And there is only one way they could have done that.”
Krivon glanced at his operations chief, who was glaring at Butler with a distinctly carnivorous avidity. “And how is this, pray tell us?” the general asked, his voice mocking. He played his own role quite well.
Butler took another step.
“The only way to take out forward observation posts—unless you make some incredibly lucky mortar shots—is to send assault teams through the line. They have to move fast, they can't get bogged down in the fighting, and they have to make their kills silently. Your observers have probably had their throats cut. Now your guns are shooting at nothing, at empty woods. The German forces have shifted position, but you can't tell where. And there's something else.”
Now he had everyone's attention. They might not believe what he was saying—probably they hadn't decided—but they were damned well listening.
The general made a hand gesture, a sign of impatience: Very well, get on with it.
“You're not facing the SS, no matter what front intelligence tells you. That's a Wehrmacht man, over there. Classically trained. Old-school. Generalstab, more than likely. This sort of ruthless finesse, this bloody-minded coolness—you don't get that with the SS. You get the newer model tanks, and formations manned at nominal strength. You get tenacity in defense, fighting to the last bullet, dying in the foxhole. And you might, at worst, get a competent commander—as opposed to some Nazi brute chosen for political reliability. But you don't get military keenness. You don't have to worry about the enemy reading your mind. And that, Comrade General, is what you've got to worry about right now.”
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