The High White Forest

CHAPTER ONE-5

Digging, or the exercise of digging, could be an end in itself. “Come on, get moving,” he ordered sharply now. “Get well back among the trees or one of these damned tanks will run over you. Sergeant Foster, make your Hochloch big enough for two; have the others help you. I’m going to stay in the jeep and study the map.” He put his flashlight on the now familiar square of paper beneath the square of transparent talc and tried again to visualize what kinds of road went with the red and blue lines stretching to the west, what hills and valleys with the brown contour lines, what distances lay between the black grid lines, how thick the trees would be in the deep green shaded areas, how large and important the towns ahead would be, what arguments there were for trying to rush straight through them, what arguments for taking the side roads and circling around. Forty-eight hours ago the names had all been totally unknown to him; now they were almost as familiar and full of meaning as the two great cities from which he derived his very marrow, his two home towns, Manhattan and Berlin.

Monschau, Krinkelt, Malmédy, St. Vith. He must be ready, depending on where the first break came, to push his jeep beyond the tanks and by-pass any one of these beckoning new towns of his and proceed thence into the rear area of the Amis. Any one of these new towns and a hundred others between here and the Meuse. And if no break came here on the northern flank, he must be ready to wheel south, if necessary all the way into the sector of the Seventh Army, beyond the tiny dark lines of print that read Clervaux, Noville, Wiltz, Longvilly, and Bastogne.

Once they reached the territory held by the Amis, the options were many and open. The written order, long since memorized and destroyed, had listed these: to conduct reconnaissance in depth east and west of the Meuse; to detect enemy tank, artillery, and other movements and report back on them by radio, in person, or by any other means that offers itself; to give false commands, when possible, to enemy units in the Allied sector; to reverse road signs; to remove the tapes from enemy-held roads that are mined; to place tapes on enemy-held roads that were not mined; to cut enemy telephone wires; to spread panic and confusion. There was no specific mention of General Eisenhower or the Arimaspian, but Tannenbaum insisted even that possibility was included in their last oral briefing. “And finally,” the Oberst had added with a sweeping wave of his arm and a huge, delighted laugh, “to give the bastards any and every kind of bloody hell you can possibly think of.”

A dispatch rider, creeping warily along the heaving line of the forming tanks, pulled his motorcycle up beside the jeep. “What outfit’s this?” he asked above his idling motor.

“What outfit’s yours?” Franz asked him in return.

“Keep your shirt on. Divisional signals, Panzer Lehr.”

“Reconnaissance Group, Special Commando Unit, Operation Einheit Stielau.” Let the smart bastard figure that one out.

The dispatch rider pulled a notebook from his belt and turned a light on it. “Look, Kamerad,” he said in exasperation. “Don’t play games with me. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Who the hell do you belong to? Tell me in language I can understand.”

“Try Operation Greif,” Franz suggested more helpfully.

“Well, for God’s sake, why didn’t you say so?” The dispatch rider spoke now with a mixture of resentment and respect. “Hey! Have you seen Skorzeny yourself? Have you talked to him? What’s he like? Is it true he nabbed old Musso with less than fifty men? They say he gets all his orders direct from the Führer, right over the heads of the High Command.”

Franz made no reply. He felt a tiny swelling of pride at the other man’s eager, admiring curiosity, but he felt it best to remain silent.

“All right, then, all right,” the dispatch rider said in the hurt tone of a small boy who has just been refused an autograph. “But you have to tell me one thing whether you want to or not. Have you seen the field marshal’s special order of the day? Or has it been read to you?”

Franz hesitated again.

“It’s the field marshal’s personal order that every man on the front receive his message before dawn,” the soldier on the motorcycle said.

“I don’t know anything about it.”

The dispatch rider drew off his gauntlet, blew on his fingers, reached inside his leather jacket, drew out a sheaf of papers, and handed Franz the top copy. “Here,” he said. “You’re to see that it’s read to or by everyone in your command or traveling in your vehicle.” He rode off down the edge of the column. “Well anyway,” he called back, still a trifle aggrieved, still a trifle awed, “Good luck.”

Franz read the paper twice, once hurriedly to see if it required any action on his part, the second time translating it into English, wondering how it might sound ten years from now in the history class at P.S. 77 at the corner of Eighty-sixth Street East and First Avenue in Manhattan, how it might sound at some future anniversary service of the German-American Bund.

It would ring forth again, he knew at once, as pure and hard and strong as the first “Sieg Heil!” Whatever doubts, whatever interventions, whatever interruptions, whatever unhappy compromises had been forced in upon it, this was still the untouched distillation of a faith, the clean etching on the blade of a clean, unstained dagger: Blut und Ehre, Blut und Ehre, blood and honor, blood and honor.

His tough blue eyes had not felt the sting of tears since the summer morning in 1939 when he’d looked back from the Hudson River toward the receding docks, looked at the stony palisade of skyscrapers that shut his vision off, perhaps forever, from the place where he was born; looked a final time and then gone below to sit alone until the land was out of sight.

Now he felt tears again, but these were not tears of melancholy. They were tears of simple devotion and an almost unbearable exultation. The paper banner cried:

Soldiers of the Western Front! Your great hour has come. Strong attacking armies are advancing against the Anglo-Americans! I do not need to tell you more than that. You yourselves feel it! We gamble everything! You bear in yourselves the holy duty to give all and to achieve the superhuman for OUR FATHERLAND and OUR FÜHRER!

Commander in Chief West

Von Runstedt

Field Marshal