The High White Forest

CHAPTER ONE-4

“Fogck.”

A knifelike sleet began driving in across the treetops. It smothered the farthest gusts and gleams of light, but closer in, where the troubled panzers threw orange sparks against the roadway and flashlights flickered on and off, the sleet acted as a lens and pulled the dark shapes in closer and made them twice as large as life. The noise had grown, swollen by a background chorus of half-shouted demands, orders, and questions. Where the guns and tanks and other vehicles had come to rest their crews began dismounting, taking what shelter they could from the sleet and stamping their feet, slapping their sides, and muttering therapeutic curses against the deepening cold.

Franz got out and walked a little way down the convoy. At a narrow crossroad an NCO of the Feldgendarmerie, trying without much success to control the local traffic, picked him up with a flashlight and ordered him to halt. The field policeman was not suspicious, merely curious. “So you’re one of the Yanks?” he said after Franz had answered his challenge. “They told us to watch out for you fellows. Is it true you’re going to be across the Meuse by nightfall?”

Franz hesitated. Everybody knew by now where the armies were headed, and the temptation to share the excitement with someone new was very strong. But you had to be careful with the Feldgendarmerie. They could be as dangerous as the Gestapo itself sometimes; for all he knew this was some childish security trap. “I’m not allowed to discuss those things, Gefreiter,” he said, and began walking back to the jeep.

Gotthold Preysing was still sound asleep on the back seat and the other two men were dozing too, huddled into their combat jackets with their helmets pulled down sidewise in the path of the driving sleet. Franz looked at his watch. Still more than an hour until midnight. Nearly six hours until the barrage began. If they went on sitting here like this they’d be half paralyzed by morning.

He manhandled Preysing awake and shook Tannenbaum and Lemmering erect.

“Out!” he said. “Start digging in.” He had never quite grown accustomed to giving apparently senseless orders without explaining them, but one thing he’d learned was that once you started explaining orders there was no end to it. That was one of the crucial differences between the Wehrmacht and the SS. The SS neither apologized for anything nor justified anything; even a lowly Rottenführer, passing down an order he didn’t understand himself to an even more lowly Sturmmann who didn’t understand it either, almost never violated the unwritten rule that every order explained itself, simply by reason of being an order. Franz’s men were capable of reasoning it out for themselves that they were better off digging useless trenches than sitting uselessly in the falling snow, growing more numb and useless by the minute.

He remembered the sense of outrage and anticlimax with which he himself had first heard the gospel of the shovel. This was on his very first day in the Army, more than a year before he had won his transfer to the SS. Because of the technicalities over his American citizenship—America was still neutral then—it had taken almost a year and a half before he was accepted. Amid the swift, sure triumphs of 1940, with Western Europe in collapse and Russia lying stupefied, awaiting the Führer’s pleasure, the Army could afford to be as choosy as it wanted. But soon afterward it was reaching out hungrily for every able-bodied man in sight. Franz hadn’t minded his job monitoring the BBC for the Foreign Ministry, and his boss kept assuring him that nothing he could do in uniform could possibly be of greater service to the Reich, but that wasn’t what he’d come for. When his call-up arrived at last he felt utterly sure that he had at last found his place in the grand design, not only of the Reich, but of the world and the universe.

Since then he had become accustomed to the physical realities of war and had made the much more difficult and shocking adjustment to its moral and philosophical disappointments. He still remembered his first lecture in his first training camp. He was then twenty-three, two years younger in time than he was now and perhaps forty years younger in experience, and he had fully expected his indoctrination to begin with a Wagenerian flourish of trumpets. But in this German lecture hall, as of August 1941 at any rate, they were doing things far less dramatically and with far less emotion than the Bund had done them even before the war began and even as far away as Camp Siegfried, Long Island, and Camp Nordland, New Jersey.

A very old Oberstleutnant strode in and ordered them at ease. He must have known that it was an entirely new draft and therefore an intensely keyed-up one. Most of them had been civilians not more than two days earlier, and only a few of them had as yet even drawn all their equipment. But without a single word of greeting or preamble the old officer launched into a long and immensely detailed dissertation on what he termed their most vital and previous single article of equipment. Was this the rifle? Was it the light machine gun? Was it the heavy machine gun? The grenade? The hard, killing bayonet? The mortar? Or was it perhaps something more abstract he was leading to; perhaps the sense of duty and of destiny, the sense of unity and faith between them and their new comrades. No. Indeed no. Nothing so fancy or poetic. Their most vital piece of equipment, the old Oberstleutnant was telling them, was the shovel. The shovel.

“An infantryman without a rifle is no soldier,” the weary old officer announced. “An infantryman without a shovel is a suicide. The shovel belongs to the modern infantryman as the horse to the rider or the bullet to the rifle.”

He went into a lengthy aside on the Hochloch and its uses. Momentarily confused, Franz found himself groping back toward his English. Hochloch? What was a Hochloch? He knew he ought to know and he looked around him uneasily, wondering if anybody in the room could guess he was sitting there grubbing around in the debris of his alien American youth. Foxhole! The context supplied the definition before he had time to feel really guilty; with a sense of relief he retransferred his thoughts to German.

“In modern war,” the Oberstleutnant had explained, “the infantryman does not have to build an intricate system of positions. He merely has to be able to build a Hochloch. He must be able to build it in any terrain, in any posture and at any time of day or night.”

Franz was older than most of the other recruits. He saw by their faces that they felt just as cheated and let down by this prosaic stuff as he did. They were all too green and timid to stir or cough, but the Oberstleutnant, perhaps because he had faced so many similar audiences before and had said precisely the same things to them and had seen them receive it with precisely the same expressions, sensed that their thoughts were wandering from the Hochlochen and called them back with a sharp and threatening: “Achtung!”

“The Hochloch,” he proceeded, “must be deep and narrow. Deep enough to provide full cover for the rifleman, yet enabling him at the same time, to find a proper aiming position; in addition narrow enough to provide protection for the rifleman against enemy tanks. The Hochloch must be large enough to afford room for two riflemen, for in combat two riflemen form a group. The Hochloch, therefore, has to be fifty by eighty centimeters in width and length and one meter deep. Whether its long or its short side should face the enemy depends on the terrain, the enemy situation and the assigned mission.”

When they scattered afterward to their billets, it was the consensus among the men of the new draft that this was just something someone on the General Staff had shoved into the training syllabus to keep old colonels on the payroll and young privates out of mischief. They’d surely pass this threadbare, 1917 ante-blitzkrieg nonsense down to the labor battalions, where it belonged, and start getting the fighting men ready for the fighting.

But the Oberstleutnant must have been a man of greater influence than it appeared, for the warnings he had given them all came true. “The training of the recruit in the use of the rifle and the shovel has to be given equal attention from the very first day,” he had announced. They began training in the use of the shovel on the very first day thereafter; they did not begin training with the rifle until the very eleventh day. “Young and old soldiers, of all grades, officers as well as enlisted men, must not allow a single day to pass without having practiced with the shovel,” the old officer persisted. Not a single day did pass without practice with the shovel, although the sweating young recruits agreed sourly that their preceptor must be doing his own daily practice on some private, hidden field reserved for officers. The Oberstleutnant took out a dog-eared manual and read from some even higher authority: “The use of the shovel at night, already neglected in daytime, is generally thought to be superfluous. This conclusion is wrong, for the night offers the soldier just the right opportunity to make himself invisible and invulnerable for the day.” They went on trenching exercises at night, crouching low under the pale autumn stars while underofficers lay listening a hundred yards away for telltale sounds and firing live tracer bullets two feet above the ground.

Franz was an expert with the shovel before he left his training camp; he did not become a convert until he left Normandy. He left Normandy through the Falaise gap with the last blackened, broken, stumbling remnants of the 12th SS Panzer, the young and undefilable division that had gone into battle bearing the proud name of the Hitler Jugend. The Hitler Jugend had survived in name at least, and now, having spent four months in reassembling and training its reinforcements, it was going back into battle somewhere in this very column. The Hitler Jugend, Franz had often told himself while he was helping to build it up again, had lived only because it refused to die. In his less romantic moments he also reminded himself that he, Franz Koerner, had lived because he had truly learned the holy writ of the shovel, because he had clung to his shovel as faithfully as he had clung to his rifle, clung to his shovel after his last bullet was gone, after his water was gone, after his rations were gone, after his helmet was lost, after one shoe was torn off by the concussion of a twenty-five-pounder and the other worn through to the naked, bleeding flesh. During his two months and sixteen days and nights in Normandy—days and nights of attack, counterattack, defense, and the ultimate reeling retreat—Franz’s life had been saved perhaps a dozen times by his Schmeisser, at least twice by hand grenades, and at least once by a Canadian artillery barrage that miraculously fell short and chopped up an attacking Canadian battalion just as Franz’s company seemed certain to be overrun. But his short trenching spade had saved him many more times than that. Only twice—once during a blissful three-day lull in front of Caen and another time when his regiment was pulled back a few kilos for a five-day rest—did Franz have an opportunity to dig the geometrically perfect Hochloch fifty by eighty centimeters in width and one meter deep. Often his Hochloch was no more than a hastily scrabbled furrow in a soft Norman wheat field, a rut just deep enough to offer refuge from the rising shrapnel of a ground burst or the illusion of refuge from a descending air burst. (For all his wisdom, the old Oberstleutnant had missed the essential point, the Archimedes principle of the infantry: in battle any hole in the ground displaces its own weight in fear.) Often Franz’s hastily created fortress was barely deep enough to let him burrow, pulling in his stomach and breathing shallowly, an inch or two below the trajectory of a Canadian or English machine gun or the spray of a mortar; sometimes he inhabited it only during the ten or fifteen minutes while his platoon gathered itself to dash the fifty or sixty yards from one apple orchard to another, from a farmyard to a house, from a roadside to a church, from a graveyard to a stone fence where a line of khaki helmets rose and at last there was no place of sanctuary for any man of either side.