Children of the Promise

by Dean Hughes

  One of the men in the company was from Frankfurt am Oder, a man named Heidinger. He pushed his way forward and demanded of Kitzmann that he tell the truth, not exaggerate. It was the same reaction Peter and his friends had received when they had described the other Frankfurt–Frankfurt am Main–and the other big cities of Germany. The veterans didn’t want to believe that they had fought for years to save their country, and meanwhile it had been destroyed behind their backs. Heidinger’s wife and children were in Frankfurt am Oder. Was he fighting now for nothing at all, perhaps no family to go back to?

  Peter heard one man whisper to another, “The war is lost. What are we doing here?”

  “We still have to stop the Russians,” the other soldier said. “They’ll destroy all of Germany, scorch the earth.”

  “What earth? It sounds like everything is gone already.”

  The next morning the men had mounted trucks and made a cold trip north to a region near the Gulf of Riga on the Baltic Sea in Latvia. But all the speeches came to nothing. Almost immediately the troops were thrown back again, and every day seemed to bring further retreats.

  After a few days Peter no longer knew where he was, Latvia or Lithuania. Today, once more, he had made a wild dash to save his life, and now he was catching his breath behind this wall, and the Russians were pushing forward again.

  But they didn’t come immediately. They were resolute these days, in no great hurry. And so the men in Peter’s company, or what was left of it, gradually assembled. Someone drove a sidecar to headquarters and brought back a load of withered and mostly rotten potatoes, with a few cold sausages. Peter ate everything he could get his hands on, caring little about the taste. It was terrible food, but more and better than anything he had had in days. He was about to lie back and rest when someone shouted, “Ivan!”

  Peter had hoped it would be morning before the Russians attacked, but they were apparently coming now, and he didn’t think he could run again. He hurried to the wall as the men of his company spread out. A sentry had obviously spotted foot soldiers, but no one knew how large a unit might be out there.

  Ten minutes passed, and finally the Leutnant told some men–six of them–to go over the wall and make contact. Peter was relieved that he wasn’t one of those chosen to go. He had already been on many patrols of that kind, and there was nothing more frightening.

  But he also hated this wait. When the bullets and the artillery started, the noise and chaos were unnerving, but the time just before, when the madness was about to break loose, was the worst. Each time Peter knew without saying it to himself that he might finally be among the unlucky ones. After every battle there were men down, often screaming with pain, some of them dying slowly and miserably. And every time, Peter wondered why others had been hit and he had survived. But then he would wonder about the next battle. When would his turn finally come?

  Now he peered over the wall, felt his breath coming in brief gasps, listened, watched. In the beginning his greatest fear had always been that he would die without ever again seeing his parents and Anna. Now, however, he feared that he would see them, that they would find out what he had become. He was sure they wouldn’t want him back now that he had changed.

  At least reality was simple for Peter. Behind him was another nameless village, and in front of him, in a valley filled with farms and groves of trees, were soldiers in hiding, waiting to make another push. He was a German Landser–an infantryman–and the men who cared about him were at his side. The men who hated him were beyond the wall. That was how life was now.

  Before long the patrol returned. Peter heard the men report to Leutnant Schuldt. “They’re everywhere down there,” a young Gefreiter–a private–said. “It must be a whole regiment.”

  Peter knew that might be an exaggeration, but it probably did mean they were facing a thousand, maybe two or three thousand Russian soldiers. The Germans couldn’t have

  more than three hundred men left–the remains of several companies. They were scattered along the perimeter of this village, with no chance to stop such a force.

  In a few minutes Hauptmann Albrecht, crouched and running, approached the men at the wall. “We’re not giving an inch,” he said. “We’ve got a good position, and we’re holding right here. Let’s show the Reds that we’re not going to back away this time.”

  It was insane. Even the Hauptmann didn’t sound convinced. He was merely saying what he had been told to say. When he moved on down the line, Hans slipped over next to Peter. “We have no chance,” he said. It was the first time Hans had admitted that anything his leaders did or said was questionable. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”

  “What’s not?”

  “In Hitler Youth they told us the Russians were stupid as cows. We could slaughter them at will.”

  “They’re bulls, not cows,” Peter said. And what he knew was that he had acquired a certain kind of respect for the Russians. Their incessant charges were brave beyond belief.

  “They may be bulls, but they’re stupid,” Hans said. “That’s why they charge into us the way they do. Sooner or later we’ll kill so many of them, they’ll have to stop.”

  “No they won’t. We’re the ones who can’t hold out.”

  “It’s still a great thing to die for the Fatherland,” Hans said.

  Peter said nothing. For some reason the Russians were holding off again, as they seemed to do when a battle was near.

  He and Hans stood next to each other, their rifles ready, and then, finally, they sat down and leaned against the wall. They didn’t talk.

  When dusk came, Peter concluded that the Russians had decided to wait until morning. He was relieved, and he was tired enough to sleep–in spite of everything. But the night was cold, and even though Peter rolled up in a blanket and huddled close to Hans and Helmut, he slept only in short spells.

  Toward morning a steady rain began to fall, but Peter ­didn’t dare put on his rain poncho, which would make movement more cumbersome should he need to run. The rain gradually soaked into his coat, adding weight, intensifying his shaking. His legs ached now, his whole body, from the running the day before and from some illness he had been fighting off for days.

  And then, as the clouds became slightly illuminated, Peter heard the first rumblings in the valley, and he knew the terror was about to begin again. He felt the movement in the ground first–the vibrations the tanks and armored halftracks made–and then he heard the clanking, the reverberation, the pounding of the engines.

  Peter knew that his company had no full-blown anti-tank weapons. It had small Panzerfausts, like the American bazookas, that could, at short range, destroy a tank, but there were only three of these, each with six shells. Even with perfect results, only eighteen tanks could be knocked out. And there were certainly many more than eighteen coming.

  And then the word spread through the men. They were withdrawing after all, in spite of what the Hauptmann had said the night before. Leutnant Schuldt crept up to Peter. “We’re pulling our artillery back first,” he told him. “You six men right here along the wall, stay for now. Hold off the charge as long as you can. Two other patrols will do the same. You’re all riflemen, so I’m putting you in charge. Keep the men here as long as possible. Do everything you can to slow the attack. If you knock out a few tanks, the Russians will stop. Once they do, join the rest of us, as fast as you can make it.”

  Hans and Helmut were in Peter’s patrol. The other three were young too, all boys who had come to the front with Peter. One of them, a boy named Rietenbach, was assigned to carry the Panzerfaust.

  As the main body of the company pulled back, Peter stared into the dark valley. He thought at times that he heard infantry, close, and he felt the hair on his neck stand up. But he was resigned this time. What he knew was that he had been sacrificed, that he and his friends had been left behind to die.

  When he heard a shout, he looked to his left, and in the dim light saw a Feldwebel–a sergeant–named Wedemeier
. He was waving for the patrol to move into a little depression a hundred meters or so to the east. There was a farm there, and a few outbuildings. Peter saw no advantage to moving over, but he was happy to let someone else make the decision. “Follow me,” he told his men, and they ran for the new position.

  He ran hard and then jumped over some downed trees. Behind these he began to dig frantically with his entrenching tool. “Dig in. Fast!” he yelled, and almost at the same time, the artillery opened up. The fire was directed at the position the boys had just left behind. Huge explosions sent the earth flying, shattered the wall, crushed the houses in the village just beyond. It was a hellish sight and sound, the air seeming to shudder around them even at this distance. And Peter knew that if he and his men had stayed three minutes longer, they would have been in the middle of it. He thought of God, but he knew better than to assume too much. The threat was only a few paces away now.

  Peter and Hans were still together, digging a hole for the two of them. They dug wildly, with hands and shovels, and all the while the big guns never stopped. Peter glanced to see that the village was almost gone, leveled in only a few minutes, and now debris and dust were filling the half-light of dawn. He realized at the same time that the rain had turned to snow, that gentle flakes were drifting down into the chaos.

  Another few minutes passed, and the light continued to increase. And then, as though by a trick of magic, ten tanks suddenly appeared, pushing up a road toward the village. One of the three patrols was guarding that road, and the tanks were coming straight at those six men, not far from Peter’s patrol.

  It was like watching an execution, seeing the tanks roll toward the little patrol, and Peter saw it as though in slow motion. Every second seemed to be the last, and yet the seconds kept ticking, and finally, with the first tank not more than twenty meters away, one of the soldiers fired the Panzerfaust directly into the armored front apron of the tank. There was an explosion of metal and rivets, and the tank clanked to a stop. And then a second explosion from within blew the insides out of the tank, surely killing the tank crew. But the other tanks came forward like living things, working their way around the carcass of the first tank, angling for the men, who were crouched by the road. Another explosion tore up the side of the second tank, but the third was coming around the opposite side. It continued straight at the Germans, and they finally lost their nerve. They jumped up and ran for a wooded area behind them, but the tank tracked ever closer and then riddled them with machine-gun fire. All six fell.

  Peter watched all this with a cerebral kind of revulsion, but he felt almost no emotion. It was something he had seen many times in the past few weeks. The tanks rolled on by, continued up the road. Peter thought of commanding a charge, laying down his life–and that of his friends–to stop another tank or two. But tanks were everywhere, and some were veering toward the farm where his patrol was dug in.

  Wedemeier’s men had dug in at the front of the farm, and they had apparently been spotted. Four tanks crawled toward them. “They’re dead,” Hans whispered.

  Wedemeier fired his anti-tank gun, and it ripped through one of the tanks. Another tank was now angling more toward Peter and his group, passing Wedemeier’s patrol. Wedemeier turned and fired at it–and missed. The big tank kept coming, and Rietenbach raised up and fired, but the shell struck on an angle and glanced off the armor. Now the tank driver knew the position of Peter’s men, and he drove directly at them, the crew firing machine guns. Peter curled up in the shallow hole next to Hans. The tank crashed directly over them, but the tree trunks kept the weight of the tracks from reaching into the hole. Twice the tank backed up, then moved forward, the driver obviously hoping to grind the boys into the earth. The noise, the wild shaking of the ground, the breaking of the trees–all of it was paralyzing. It seemed impossible to survive. But the logs held up enough, and the tank backed off. The driver seemed to think that he had smashed them. His tank twisted and moved away.

  “Are you all right, Hans?” Peter asked.

  “Ja,” Hans gasped, but he had hold of Peter’s coat, and he was shaking wildly.

  By then another of the big T-34 tanks had driven over some men in Wedemeier’s patrol, and Peter heard their screams. One man managed to get up and run, but a machine gun knocked him down immediately. Maybe the men in Peter’s patrol were dead too. He had no way of knowing.

  Peter raised his head enough to see that the tanks were staying nearby, turning their turrets, checking for anyone alive. He ducked his head again, but he knew this couldn’t last. Infantry always came in soon after the tank attack. How could he and Hans survive the onslaught? He thought of running for the woods, but he knew what would happen. And so, more dazed than wise, he stayed where he was.

  “Shoot me,” Hans whispered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You heard me. Shoot me. I don’t want them to kill me. You do it.”

  “No.”

  “You’re afraid. You don’t want to be here alone.”

  Peter knew that was true. The two lay there, waiting, expecting the end at any second. On and on, the sound of the tanks continued, and Peter couldn’t imagine what was happening. And then, from behind them, he heard a vehicle of some sort. He and Hans were surrounded. Peter didn’t know whether he was pretending to be dead, or whether, in fact, he couldn’t have moved had he tried. But time kept passing, and nothing happened. And then he was startled by a voice.

  “Are you alive?” someone asked.

  Peter looked up, unbelieving. “Yes, yes. What’s happening?”

  “The tanks are moving off. The whole Russian regiment has turned to the west. Some of our troops must have attacked them from the flank.”

  Peter sat up, pushed some of the dirt off him. But he still couldn’t believe it.

  “Come on. Get on the truck,” the soldier said. “Is anyone else alive?” And now the others in Peter’s group stood up: Helmut and the other three. And two from Wedemeier’s patrol. Eight of the eighteen had actually survived.

  Peter was too scared, too spent, to feel happy. He got up, and he pulled Hans up after him. They staggered to the truck and climbed on. Neither said a word to the other, and when the men on the truck asked what they had been doing, they didn’t answer. Peter had already died, in his mind, and he could hardly accept the idea that he was alive again. But he didn’t exult in this reprieve. Death was still waiting.

  Chapter 23

  For Alex and the men of E Company, the war was now monotony broken by intervals of terror. The men were still in Holland, still dug in near the Lower Rhine, but it was November, and the weather was turning colder all the time. The soldiers dug their foxholes with split-level bottoms so the water would run to the lower level and could be dredged out. The ground never dried, however, so the men had to drop ponchos or tree limbs into the mud and then curl up and sleep as best they could. But the dampness in Alex’s clothes made sleep almost impossible. After fitful nights that offered little rest, he would awake to an empty day, with nothing to do but wait again. From time to time he led a patrol toward the river, but there was little action now. The Germans, too, had become content to sit and wait.

  The Wehrmacht possessed the higher ground, however, and they could observe the Americans. They would lull the troops into expecting nothing and then send in a barrage of artillery fire. If the shells caught a man out in the open, the flying shrapnel would slice him up, so it wasn’t wise to stray too far from a foxhole.

  Alex heard rumors about a pullout, and he couldn’t imagine that paratroopers would be left like this–dug in like infantrymen all winter–but days kept passing and nothing changed. At times the numbness that came from the cold and the wet and the mud filled his head so completely that it was difficult to care about anything, even to remember why he had to be careful to preserve his life.

  Alex was still buddying up with Howie. Duncan and Ernst were dug in together. Ernst was rough around the edges, much like the young Duncan who had sho
wn up at training camp in 1942. So he and Duncan had a natural affinity–especially since both were Southern boys–even though Duncan had changed so much. Pozernac and Gourley remained close buddies too, even though they sometimes got on each other’s nerves. Campbell was alone for now and seemed to like it that way. Curtis had taken a young replacement under his wing. The kid, Irv Johnston, was only eighteen, from the hills of West Virginia. He was a muscular boy with a subtle smile and odd but handsome eyes, the color of pea soup. His strong accent made him seem something of a hick, but he was smart, and he had a difficult time accepting the strange way the army did its business.

  One day, when the rain had let up a little and the sun was actually filtering through a layer of thin clouds, Alex walked over to Curtis and Johnston’s foxhole. “How are you guys doing?” he asked. The two of them were out of the hole, sitting on a log. They had kept a little fire going, and they were trying to heat up a pan of water for tea with their lunch. Not many of the men liked tea, but it was what they got with their English ration boxes.

  “We’re having us a great ol’ time, Sergeant Thomas,” Johnston said. “Sort of a picnic, I guess you’d call it.”

  “Yeah,” Curtis said, “I think, after the war, I’ll come here every year for vacation–and camp out.”

  “You want some tea?” Johnston asked Alex.

  “No, thanks.”

  “He doesn’t drink coffee or tea,” Curtis said. “He’s a Mormon.”

  “What’s wrong with coffee?” Johnston asked. “My pa would never make it through a day without a big ol’ pot of coffee–blacker than crude oil.”

  Alex crouched next to the men and tried to get as close to the little fire as he could. “It’s not really good for your body,” was all he said.

  “I can see where you wouldn’t want to harm your body,” Johnston said. “After a nice night in a wet foxhole, and sitting down here where an 88 could drop on your head at any second, you sure wouldn’t want to take a chance on a cup of tea.”