1901

by Robert Conroy

  There was little further meaningful conversation. Holstein implied his support while Becker again asserted his loyalty to the kaiser and the Reich. Finally Holstein hinted that the conversation should be concluded, and Becker departed after yet a further protestation of loyalty.

  Alone, Holstein brooded upon the conversation. Becker was the intelligent voice of modern and moderate Germany. He was intensely loyal and proud of his new nation, yet very unhappy with the current state of affairs. If such a man as Becker was so distressed, then what of the others? Certainly, Becker was not a radical, not one of the students rioting in the university cities like Heidelberg. Becker had only a nephew or two serving in the armies. What of those who had sons and brothers? Or husbands and fathers, what with the reserves now being sent over. With more than a hundred thousand soldiers and many thousands more naval personnel involved, how many angry and dissatisfied families were there? The kaiser, he thought sadly, would never understand.

  The meal was over and Patrick was stuffed. Trina had come up with a tender beefsteak covered with an elegant wine sauce and mushrooms, delicate mashed potatoes, fresh vegetables, and an apple pie dessert that was light and sinfully good. Washed down with a decent Bordeaux, it was, he decided, about as good as dinner gets.

  “Some more pie, Patrick?”

  With sincere regrets he declined. “I suppose I should have stopped eating at some point to tell you how delicious everything was.”

  She smiled, delighted. “I cooked it all myself.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course not. I did help and could cook if it were the only way to avert starvation, but Molly did most of it, and I bought the pie from a neighbor.”

  “And I’ll bet you didn’t stomp the grapes for the wine, either,” he added, wiping what he hoped were the last crumbs from his chin.

  “ ‘Fraid not.” They both smiled at the vision of the elegant and very patrician Katrina Schuyler jumping up and down in a grape-filled vat.

  Cautiously, so as not to disturb his meal, he rose, and the two of them walked through the house and out to the yard. It was getting measurably darker as the days neared the start of fall, and, although it was still quite warm, there was the barest hint of the coming winter in the air. They sat side by side on a high-backed bench.

  “Katrina, do you like baseball?”

  She turned, her eyes wide. “Why Patrick, I do believe that’s the most romantic question anyone’s ever asked. Was it the meal or the wine?”

  He chuckled. “Both. So, do you?”

  “I’ve seen a few games. They’re rather slow but pleasant enough. Why?”

  “Well, I read the papers every day and see the scores. It reminds me there’s a life going on without me. There’s a major-league team now in Detroit and I’ve never seen them. Frankly, and for no logical reason, it left me a little depressed.”

  “I think I know the feeling.” Life, she sometimes thought, was passing her by as well.

  “Do you like football? Basketball?”

  She laughed. “I hate football. I’ve seen games at Princeton, but it’s just a bunch of thugs trying to push each other down a field. I have no opinion on basketball since I have only heard of it and never seen it played. I understand the purpose of it and that it can be quite rough.”

  “It’s a new game meant to be played indoors. Teams of men try to put a large ball in a basket.”

  “Sounds rather foolish.”

  “So does any game when you try to analyze it, I guess.”

  They were silent for a few moments, each taking in the presence of the other. Finally Trina broke the spell. “Patrick, Heinz will be coming home to us in a few days and I will again be forced to look at what war does. When will this end?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know. I can tell you that my role in it has apparently changed. MacArthur has told me my brigade will not be going into the line.”

  “Wonderful!”

  “Hah! Beware of generals bearing gifts. We have been ordered to practice maneuvering on the attack. Apparently we will be used as assault troops if the Germans breach our lines.”

  “You’re right. That’s awful.”

  “So we’ve been out learning how to operate as a whole brigade. It hasn’t been easy. Even the 9th and 10th have rarely operated as whole entities. They’ve usually been broken up into small frontier garrisons. The men are willing and they’re learning quickly. I just have no idea how much good my little brigade will be if the German army comes through. I’ve also been working on different tactics to minimize the awful losses now possible thanks to repeating rifles and machine guns.”

  Trina shuddered at the thought. Enough of war. “Patrick, I do like sports. I’ve golfed, played tennis, swum, hiked, and ridden. You should be well aware there are few opportunities for women to play anything. Men have concocted a fiction that we are frail little creatures, incapable of honest physical effort. Worse,” she sneered, “there are many foolish female creatures who like to live that way and they simperingly conform to the myth, thereby perpetuating it.”

  Patrick put his arm around her shoulders and she moved slightly toward him. She was slender but hardly frail. “Patrick,” she continued, “when this is over, where do we go? You and I.”

  It was a question he almost dreaded finding the answer to. “I don’t know. I’ve come to depend on you so much. I want the war to end, but not us.”

  She moved a little closer. “Why, Patrick, that actually was almost romantic.”

  He smiled. She hadn’t rejected him. “I mean it,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

  She put her arm around his chest and squeezed. “I don’t want you to go away either.” She disengaged herself and sat up straight. “Brave general, can you get some time off, say about a week?”

  “I think so. Why?”

  “I forgot to mention, but my father is in Albany. We have a small house there.” Katrina smiled pleasantly. “Most people would call it a castle, but we rich folk call it a house. I would like to take you there to meet my father. We could eat like little pigs, and hike and swim off all the food. Father could watch.” If he hasn’t brought along a girlfriend, she thought. If he had, they both could watch. Oh dear. That was something she would never have thought before.

  Patrick could see her eyes shining brightly in the clear night, and he made the easy decision. “I will inform MacArthur that he will have to continue the war without me. Give me a few days to arrange things and we can go.” He paused. “Uh, what about Heinz and Molly?”

  “Molly can handle him. She already informed me of that and in no uncertain terms. If she does need any help, there are people around, like Annabelle Harris, and I’ll arrange for them to look in. Somehow I think they’ll revel in the privacy, broken arm or no broken arm.”

  They leaned toward each other and kissed deeply. Both were aware that a new threshold in their relationship had been crossed. Patrick had never been to Albany, never wanted to go. Now he wanted more than anything to go there and be with Trina. And he knew she wanted him there as well.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The bridge across the small stream was a fairly solid-looking stone structure that easily supported the weight of a wagon loaded with materiel or the marching feet of fifty or so armed men. Until recently, the bridge hadn’t even been necessary. Generations of Long Islanders had simply eased themselves down the gentle banks on each side and walked across the stream, sometimes barely getting their feet wet. Even in a flood, the stream was rarely more than a few feet deep, and today it was quite shallow.

  But a bridge was meant to be crossed and that meant traffic took advantage of its existence all day long and sometimes into the night. Blake Morris sat comfortably in the shade of a shrub and watched the quaint little bridge, barely two hundred yards away. The three men with him were all of his little band that he’d allotted to this task. The rest were in the warehouse area of Brooklyn, or what was left of that lovely city, and had their own assignments. The
re had been some discussion as to the wisdom of dividing up their small force, but the men in charge of the Brooklyn operation were more than qualified. They would hurt the Germans in the area of materiel; he would hurt their souls. As the Apaches on the mainland made the Germans fear the night, he, Blake Morris, would make them fear the day and cause what had been familiar and friendly to suddenly seem sinister and hostile.

  Which was why the bridge, so quaint and charming, gently spanning a stream whose name he didn’t know, was such an appropriate choice.

  “What time is it?” Blake hissed, unnecessarily quiet. The response came that it was a little past two in the afternoon. Blake sighed and continued to wait. If all had gone well in Brooklyn, that event was already over. Perhaps he should have gone there with his men. No, he reminded himself, this would strike at the enemy’s soul, if the Germans had souls.

  A tremble, a murmur, passed through the air. He looked and the others had heard it too. There was the soft exhalation of their own breath. The wondrously punctual Germans were arriving.

  Shortly, the sounds took on definition. The bastards were actually singing! A few minutes later he could see them as they approached the bridge, his bridge. His cute little bridge. First came a lead group of ten, a squad. These were followed by a handful of mounted officers and then the remainder of the battalion, hundreds of men in columns of four. They were in step, he noticed. Despite the fact that they were in the country, their commander had evidently continued to insist they march in step rather than walk at a natural pace. What a fool! Did he think the creatures in the meadow were watching his parade? He must be loved by his troops.

  Blake’s three men checked for outriders and saw none. It wasn’t a surprise. There had been no outriders yet when the battalions changed positions, as they did every Tuesday at this time. When this battalion reached the encampment a few miles up the road, the one currently out there would return down the same road to the dubious comforts of Brooklyn.

  The head of the column reached the bridge and crossed without breaking stride. It didn’t take long. It was such a little bridge.

  Blake waited until the officers and the first company of infantry were completely across. The lead squad was near the red-leaved bush he’d arbitrarily designated as the end of the target area. “Now,” he ordered himself aloud and pushed down on the plunger. For the barest second nothing happened. There was the inevitable momentary fear that the device had failed, then the bridge lifted into the air and seemed to come apart, stone by stone, soldier by soldier. Before the Germans had a moment to even blink, lines of additional explosions walked down the dirt road in both directions from the now-atomized bridge structure. Almost immediately, the sound of the explosions and the shock waves engulfed them. Then there was silence.

  It was several seconds before the screaming started. Because of the slow-settling clouds of dust, Blake couldn’t actually see what he’d done, but he was fairly certain the battalion no longer existed.

  Later, he would meet up with the crew sent to Brooklyn. If all had gone according to plan, a score of the German warehouses had gone up in smoke and flame. His only regret was that they were not ammunition warehouses. Those were kept under tight guard within the inner German perimeter. What he had been able to gain access to were the stores of food and uniforms; thanks to his other crew, these had doubtless been dynamited as well.

  The fucking Krauts wouldn’t starve or go cold any more than they would stop coming down the road and crossing the stream. But it would make them think every time they took a step or opened a door.

  Tonight when he slept, maybe his wife would come to him and nod her approval. He smiled.

  If there was anything more boring than guard duty, Ludwig Weber couldn’t think of it. Even peeling potatoes was more rewarding. Unless, of course, he had to work with Kessel. However, as a corporal and the captain’s aide, he really didn’t have to perform kitchen police and usually got out of pulling guard duty as well.

  But this, as Sergeant Gunther calmly explained over Ludwig’s mild protests, really wasn’t guard duty. It was a roadblock and, because of the recent incidents of sabotage and worse, the idea was to check on who was coming up and down the road. So it was that he and a handful of others watched a dusty and largely untraveled route behind the German lines in Connecticut. At least, thanks to his exalted rank of corporal, he was in charge of the little group. Better, Kessel was not with them. Thank you, Sergeant Gunther, for that small favor.

  Although not all of the men at the roadblock had been with him during that fateful stay in New York, they all had been touched by it. As far as he and his men were concerned, the whore who had murdered Ulli had not been found. Of that he was certain, even though a woman had been executed for the crime. Perhaps even worse than Ulli’s murder and castration was the fact that some poor woman who fit the general description of the prostitute had been arrested, shown to them, and, over their protestations, shot.

  Ludwig shuddered. He hadn’t seen the woman who seduced Ulli, but the Schuler boys had, and they had tearfully insisted that the retarded-looking slattern with the greasy dark hair whom the military police had picked up wasn’t her. The German police simply insisted that she had to be because she had been found in the area and fit the general description. They had the company watch as a firing squad pulverized her with bullets. The poor thing had been wide-eyed and slobbering with terror. Her mouth was deformed and she wasn’t even able to speak, only grunt. It was then that Ludwig realized with a chill that the police were more concerned with closing the case than with solving the crime. Bastards. The event had seared them all. The death of dumb Ulli was such a waste, such a shame. What bothered him more than anything, except the attitude of the police, was the fact that some of his men, speaking in whispers, blamed the German military for having them here where they could be killed and not the slut who’d cut off Ulli’s cock.

  And Ludwig had a hard time disagreeing with them.

  “Hey, Ludwig, wagon coming.”

  Ludwig shaded his eyes with his hand. Yes, it was a wagon. One lone wagon with two German soldiers in it, and it was pulled by one slow, old horse. Yes, it was a real threat. He rose slowly and started to walk the score or so strides from the shade to where the sun shone on the hastily improvised roadblock. This consisted of a length of wood on a stone stretched across the road, and a hand-painted sign that read “Halt.”

  One of the Schuler boys offered to go with him, but Ludwig told him to go back to sleep. He could handle this massive threat to their security all by himself. It was only the third or fourth time anyone had come down the road all day. Ludwig stood in front of the sign and held his hand palm outward, and the wagon stopped. He could see that the two men were a little older and their uniforms didn’t fit that well, which made him fairly certain that they were reservists. Ludwig may have hated the army, but he took pride in the way they looked. This pair looked like slobs in comparison with the regulars. Perhaps he was being too harsh. Ludwig also didn’t recognize their unit, but that wasn’t surprising either. With all the reservists about, he hadn’t heard of half their regiments. After all, he thought, stifling a yawn, he was a teacher, not a soldier.

  One of the men in the wagon was a sergeant; the driver was a private. Well, Ludwig thought, reserves or not, the sergeant has more stripes than I do and that makes him God if he wants to be. The sergeant didn’t want to push it, however. He smiled amiably and asked what the matter was.

  “Nothing much.” Ludwig grinned back. “This is the most important road in America and we’re watching it for the Reich.”

  The two men laughed and agreed. They knew make-work when they saw it. Funny, Ludwig thought, he didn’t quite recognize their accents, and he thought he knew all the regional nuances. “Where to?” he asked.

  “Just going in to the supply center,” the sergeant replied. “We got a shopping list and specific directions from our captain. Jesus, what an old lady.”

  Ludwig grinned and look
ed around. It wasn’t proper to criticize an officer that harshly. He and his friends did it privately, but not to a perfect stranger. He asked them what unit they were from and was told they were with the 141st Infantry, a reserve regiment. Well, that confirmed his guess and was probably why they were so critical of their commander. Rumor had it the reserves were not overwhelmed with joy at being here. For that matter, neither was he.

  As he looked in the back of the wagon, Ludwig idly asked the sergeant where his hometown was and was given the name of a village he didn’t recall. It didn’t matter. He was getting bored again. The only things in the back of the wagon were a steamer trunk and the soldiers’ rifles, which lay flat on the floor. He noticed that the trunk was unlocked and the hasp had worked its way open. A piece of paper was protruding. He decided to do them a favor, so he pulled out the piece of paper and opened the trunk to reclose it properly.

  He gasped. It was full of sheets of paper. Thousands of them. And they all had similar messages. “Surrender,” they read, or “Stay in America,” “Live Free,” or “Americans Are Your Friends-Not the Kaiser.”

  His knees weakened and he had to grab the side of the wagon for support. He looked at the two men, who were staring at him, their faces suddenly pale and their expressions frozen. In his mind, he started to cry out for help, call for the others, but no sound came. Dear God, these are Americans, not Germans. No wonder their accents are so strange. Either they never lived in Germany or had lived there so long ago their accents had changed. Oh, God. Help.

  Instead, a hand-it was a stranger’s, although he knew it was connected to his arm-closed the trunk and fixed it tight. Then a voice-it sounded like his-told them in a hoarse whisper to leave. Leave now. Get the fuck away from here! Now, now, now!

  With forced slowness, the driver eased the wagon around the slight barricade and trotted on down the road. The sergeant turned and looked incredulously on the source of his good fortune, his survival. Had they been caught in German uniforms they would have hanged. Ludwig stood there, his body drenched in sweat, and tried to regain control of himself. He felt himself quivering. Finally he gathered the strength to return to his squad. He was certain they knew what had happened. He had let the Americans go, and the fact of his treason had to be emblazoned on his face. Instead, no one was even looking at him. One of the Schulers had found a toad and they were trying to make it jump by sticking it with a penknife. Ludwig leaned against a tree and tried to breathe.