Children of the Promise

by Dean Hughes

  Anna did want that. She had never had a sister, and she longed to experience that kind of closeness with Bobbi–and with all of Alex’s family. Life was so full of dread and worry, it was true, but it was also full of hope, if only she could get back those she loved so much.

  Christmas morning was not easy. The Dillinghams were optimists by nature and rather lighthearted in the way they approached life. But their discouragement was obvious that morning. Edward had only said it once, but Anna knew it was on his mind all the time now: “We had thought the worst of the worries was over for our family.”

  As it turned out, however, everyone had managed to buy some little thing for everyone else, and the exchange was good fun. Sister Stoltz had baked a German Weinachts Stollen, the traditional Christmas cake. She served it with an herbal tea, and everyone liked it very much.

  “Thank you so much, deary,” Mrs. Dillingham told Sister Stoltz. “It’s such a lovely thing to have a little sweet now and then. I can hardly remember the days when we had so much–and hardly appreciated it.”

  Sister Stoltz, whose English had improved a great deal since the Dillinghams had moved in, told her, “Maybe the war makes us learn something.”

  Mr. Dillingham sipped at his tea. “I think I’ve learned quite enough to last me for a time,” he said, and he chuckled, his voice sounding warm. He had a way of dropping his head when he looked at a person, as though he had to do so to see over his big nose, but it always made Anna feel as though he were going out of his way to look closely, to make a clear connection.

  Anna had gotten used to the way the English thought and spoke. She liked Mr. Dillingham’s understatement. Surely everyone in the world had learned enough to last for a long time, she thought. She knew that people had a way of forgetting quickly, but this amount of suffering had to stick with people for generations to come, it seemed.

  It was a quiet day, and the good humor of the morning gradually slipped away, at least for Anna, toward a disappointing melancholy. She always wanted too much from Christmas. She remembered the enchantment of the day from her childhood, and she often thought of the year when she had been sixteen and Alex had been a missionary in her home. She also remembered that one wonderful year, during the war, when the Rosenbaums had still been safe with her family. But those thoughts were not helpful, and so she told herself to be thankful she had escaped Germany and that she was married to Alex. She went to her bedroom, read Bobbi’s letter again, and then knelt and prayed that Alex was all right today, that he would find some comfort in spite of the conditions he was living in, and that he would live to return to her. Then she prayed for her brother and her father. She only allowed herself to cry for a minute or two.

  Then she sat on her bed, and for a time, like Mary, she pondered the secret in her heart. In October she had suspected she was pregnant. By November she had been certain. She had wanted Alex to be the first to know, and so she had written him in Holland. But in his latest letter he had not mentioned it. The last letters she had sent to Holland had apparently not caught up with him in France. She had told him again, now, but she didn’t know whether these new letters had reached him before he had gone into battle. Perhaps he still didn’t know that he was going to be a father.

  Anna had thought of telling her mother that morning, but she feared that the news, in spite of its loveliness, would also add another worry to her mother’s mind. It was also still something Anna wanted to hold for Alex. She wanted to feel that the two had shared this wonder with each other before they passed it along to others.

  Anna had been lucky so far. She had felt an occasional wave of nausea but not the debilitating morning sickness she knew some women suffered. And yet she was almost disappointed. She longed for a sense of change within her. She wanted to feel the life that God was creating. And at the same time she also wondered, would the war end in time for Alex to come back to her, so he could be with her when her time came? And always, virtually every minute of the day, a haunting question was lurking in her thoughts: What if he never gets a chance to see his own child?

  But she refused to dwell on that. She touched the palms of her hands against her abdomen, over her womb, and she shut her eyes. “I love you,” she whispered. “We’ll be all right.” She meant the baby, of course, but she also meant Alex. She had to trust that somehow the three of them would have a chance to share their lives.

  ***

  Peter was sitting in the cellar of a bombed-out building. The cold was paralyzing outside, but the cellar wasn’t quite so bad. He was wearing his heavy coat and had wrapped a blanket around his legs. He had eaten a tin of applesauce, the only food he’d had in the past twenty-four hours and the best food he’d eaten in weeks; now he was merely staring ahead, feeling some sense of relief to be out of the cold, to have eaten a little, not to be under fire. But he was too exhausted, too emotionally and physically spent, to feel much of anything but the numbness that filled his brain.

  Hans was sitting next to Peter. “Someone said it’s Christmas,” Hans said, absently.

  Peter didn’t know whether that was right, but a defense inside him responded quickly. He pushed the idea away.

  Life had become a long series of momentary stops laced with firefights and bombardment from airplanes, big guns, tanks, and then another hard run through the snow. Everywhere around him, on every road and lane, were thousands of refugees. All across Latvia and Lithuania–and surely Poland and East Prussia, too–the people had been fleeing from the constantly moving front. The Russians made little ­distinction between soldiers and civilians, nor was that easy to do. Often the refugees, both men and women, picked up the rifles of fallen Germans and fought for the sakes of their families.

  The death and devastation were beyond anything Peter ever could have imagined. Whenever the skies cleared, fighters and dive bombers wiped out whole villages. The ground troops then followed and burned everything in sight. Tank crews gunned down civilians–women, children, everyone–and then rolled over their bodies, smashing and breaking them.

  Peter had seen so much horror that there was no reacting anymore. He had struggled to get by on meager rations, had known almost constant hunger, but around him he had seen refugees drop and die beside the road, eaten away by fatigue and hunger. Some carried dead babies with them, and then buried them when they felt safe enough to scratch a shallow hole in the frozen earth. He had watched refugees kneel and pray over these makeshift graves and then hurry on.

  The fleeing German troops had reached Memel, in Lithuania, on the Baltic. It was a trap, a cul-de-sac, but there had been no other direction to retreat. Germans were trying to evacuate hundreds of thousands of refugees by way of the sea, and the soldiers were now called upon to hold the perimeter around the city until the civilians were able to escape.

  The talk, of course, was that the soldiers would follow, but the men knew better. Peter never thought in terms of hope anymore. It wasn’t that he had given up; that required thought. He simply accepted the reality that death would come before much longer. Every day he saw soldiers die, and even though he still screamed when artillery shells struck close, that didn’t mean he hoped to avoid the shell or bullet or grenade that would finally take him. His screams were merely a reaction, like the wailing that scared him from his sleep some nights. He would awake, startled, thinking someone had screamed, and then know that the noise had come, was still coming, from himself. Sometimes Hans would also roll up on his side and shriek, and then begin to cry, or even laugh. Everyone understood; every soldier did it at times. The terror would simply build up until it had to come out in some way.

  Long lines of civilians waited all day for ships, boats, barges, anything to carry them out of the trap and along the coast to East Prussia. This was only a momentary salvation, since the front was steadily pushing west, but the voyage would get the refugees behind the front lines again, and then they could continue their flight. As the people stood in lines, however, Russian airplanes would dive out of the sky
and strafe or bomb not just the city but specifically the people. Little was left of the town of Memel. All was leveled, smoldering, and so the last target seemed to be the refugees themselves.

  Peter had watched as the people stayed in their lines even though they knew full well they would draw attacks. They saw no answer but to climb on the next boat, or the one after that. When the airplanes struck, and people fell, others would tend to them or drag the bodies away, but then, immediately, the lines would form again. And after all that, the ships were often attacked, and those who had survived the wait in the lines would die in the icy water.

  But Peter didn’t react to any of this. The human body, he now understood, was very delicate. It could be pulled apart, crushed, broken. And when it lay in the mud, with the blood pumping from it, he had never seen anything escape, no soul. He remembered what he had believed just a few months before, and he didn’t deny any of it. For him, it was one reality, gone, and this was another. In this new state of mind, life had very little significance, and death none at all. One day he had seen an older couple standing next to a heap of bodies. The man had picked up a rifle from a fallen soldier. He had appeared pleased and excited to find such a prize. But then he had calmly turned to his wife. She waited, quietly, as he fired a bullet into her chest. She had been thrown backward by the blast before she folded in on herself and dropped. Then the man had turned the rifle on himself, bending over and aiming it between his eyes. Peter saw the man’s head burst, but he didn’t look away. It was nothing new to him, and he understood. They were old and tired of running, starving. It seemed a sensible choice.

  And still, he wanted to live. He didn’t believe he would, but something inside him said that he wanted to survive at least another day. A week before, his company–or the remnant of it–had been sent south to take on the Russians and stop the pincer movement that was gradually strangling the troops in Memel. They had caught the Russian troops by surprise, and they had driven them back six miles or so. But ultimately their numbers, their equipment, and their weapons had proven inadequate. When the Russians attacked their flank, the Germans were strung out and had to make a desperate flight, mostly at night, back into Memel. Almost all of Peter’s friends had been killed or taken captive. In the chaos, Hans and Peter had lost track of Helmut. He was probably dead. And so were many of the veterans who had lasted through five long winters of this war. Next to those veterans lay the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds who had lasted only a few months. Peter had seen these boys fall, scream for help, cry like little children, and he had stopped to help when he could. But finally he’d had to keep going or die himself. And now, sitting in this basement, he knew what he should have done: stayed, made some boy’s last minutes a little better, and then died with him. What appealed to him was the idea of dying with a bit of honor instead of being blown apart in this cellar by a sudden blast from an artillery shell, or dying of starvation and exposure to the cold, the worst possibility of all.

  Hans leaned toward Peter and put his hand on his arm. “If I could be home for Christmas one more time in my life,” he whispered, “I wouldn’t complain.”

  Peter looked at Hans’s hand, the gray skin of his wrist where his glove and sleeve didn’t quite meet. Hans had suffered with frostbite time and again. His hands and feet were in ter­rible shape. Peter had suffered that way too, but not as severely as Hans.

  Peter saw no chance that a miracle would somehow lift Hans out of all this and carry him back to his Black Forest village for another Christmas. What he did feel was pain for Hans, and that was almost like life. That hint of life caused a picture to form in his mind: a Christmas in Frankfurt, with a tree in the living room, and Elder Thomas and Elder Mecham singing American Christmas songs. He saw Anna, his pretty sister, so taken with Elder Thomas, and his mother, so happy. Peter had loved those elders, had wanted so badly to be like them. He hadn’t had any idea then that his body was breakable, that his spirit could be crushed with his body. He hadn’t imagined any such reality as he had discovered here in this war. For the first time in a long time he actually wished he could travel backward to that time. What he didn’t believe was that there was any chance he could move forward and get there again.

  He told Hans, “We’ll get through. We’ll be all right.” But he didn’t look at him. He knew that if they looked in each other’s eyes, they would see the truth.

  ***

  Alex and Howie had walked through the woods to the headquarters tent. They were taking their turn at receiving the Christmas dinner that had been brought to them on trucks from Bastogne. As much as possible, everyone would receive turkey and mashed potatoes today. Even cranberry sauce. It was all from a can, and no longer hot, and was worse tasting than some of the choices in a K-ration box, but the idea of it was appealing. There was no table, no chairs, so the men hunkered down next to the tent to avoid the wind a little, and they ate from their mess kits.

  “Just like Mom’s cooking,” Alex said, and he laughed.

  “If this is how your mother cooks, don’t invite me over for dinner,” Howie told him. He sipped at some hot coffee.

  In a few minutes Duncan and Curtis came out of the woods and walked toward the tent. “How is it?” Duncan asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” Howie said.

  Alex liked to see Howie joking, talking.

  Duncan and Curtis got their food and then returned. They crouched next to Alex and Howie and began to eat. The snow around the tent was trampled down, but sitting on the ground would be a mistake in this cold. More supplies had been dropped that morning. Some blankets had reached the men–although not nearly enough. At least Alex’s squad had received one for each foxhole. That would help a little, but the men needed coats and underwear and galoshes. They understood the difficulty of supplying an entire division, but they were tired and angry–and so they cursed the army for all the foul-ups. Everyone believed that the support troops stole the best of the supplies and cared little for the men on the front lines.

  “Listen to that shelling,” Curtis said. “Someone’s taking a beating.”

  The sounds were coming from the distant south, on the opposite side of Bastogne, and it seemed incongruent that the Germans would interrupt their own Christmas to make a thrust of this kind.

  “Do you know who that is returning fire for our side down there?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Duncan said.

  “That’s the 969th Field Artillery Battalion–a colored unit.”

  Duncan grinned. “Glad they’re here,” he said. “I hope they keep the Jerries out. If they break through our line somewhere, we’re all in trouble.”

  Alex had thought a great deal about that. He knew that the entire division could be placed in a position where surrender would be the only option. He didn’t want to die, of course, but the idea of being taken prisoner was almost as bad. “What did you think of what McAuliffe told the Germans?” he asked.

  The men laughed, and Curtis said, “I can just see the German generals asking each other, ‘What does zis mean? Nuts?’”

  Every soldier had received a Christmas greeting from General McAuliffe, who had been left in command when General Maxwell Taylor had been called to Washington for meetings just before the “bulge” had broken out. McAuliffe was better liked than Taylor anyway, and his greeting, although a little too full of bravado, had included a story the soldiers loved. The Germans had apparently sent a representative to the American command, and he had offered the 101st a chance to surrender. General McAuliffe wrote to the men that he had sent back a one-word response: “Nuts!”

  McAuliffe had also wished the soldiers a Merry Christmas, and then he had said, “What’s merry about all this, you ask? Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South and West. We are giving our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas pres­ent, and being privileged to take part in this gallant feat of arms, we are truly making for ourselves a Merry Christmas.” />
  “I like what he told the Krauts,” Duncan said. “I don’t want to give up. But all that Merry Christmas stuff was a little hard to take. If I was living in some hotel in town, sitting down to three good meals a day–and some good whiskey–I might feel pretty merry myself.”

  “He’s in the same trap as the rest of us,” Alex said. “He knows he’s blowing some smoke at us, but he also wants us to keep our spirits up.” Alex had finished eating but was still sipping some warm water into which he had poured lemon crystals from his K rations. It tasted terrible, but it felt good inside. His legs were getting tired, though, so he stood up.

  Duncan laughed. “Hey, we’re paratroopers. We don’t need no rah-rah speeches. We love this stuff–surrounded, fighting off the enemy from all sides. Not enough food or ammo. Ready to fight with our bayonets and bare hands. That’s what we live for.”

  Curtis stood up. He looked at Alex. “Remember that speech Summers gave us on the first day at Toccoa–when he kept yelling for us all to quit right then and there?”

  Alex looked down at Howie. “Yeah, that’s one thing you missed,” Alex said. “Summers told us, the first time he ever saw us, that we were a bunch of idiots to sign up with an airborne outfit. We were sure to die if we stayed on.”

  “We got some of that same stuff on our first day too,” Howie said.

  Now Duncan stood, and Howie. The men created the four sides of a square. Alex thought how ragged they all looked, caked with mud from head to foot.

  “Summers was right,” Duncan said. “We were stupid to stay on.” But he laughed.

  “I wanted to quit so bad,” Alex said. “The only reason I stayed was that I didn’t want the rest of the guys–especially you, Duncan–to think I was a quitter.”

  “That’s the same reason I stayed,” Curtis said.

  “Hey, I was talking so big, I had to stay,” Duncan said, and he laughed harder than ever. “But I was shaking in my boots. I wanted to catch the first bus home.”