The High White Forest

CHAPTER ONE-1

CHAPTER ONEThe attack was not to begin for another seven hours and twenty-three minutes, but already the last of the medium guns were coming into position on the slopes and in the clearings and the first of the tanks were creeping out of the heavy, dark, snow-burdened woods to start forming up their columns. Although a heavy mist lay close to the narrow roadways and the thick pines and firs drew it in like blotting paper, a partial blackout was being enforced. There was no danger of air observation and from the foremost tip of the foremost panzer to the foremost American outpost the distance was believed to be at least seven kilometers, but it was important to establish a pattern of discipline at the outset. Smoking was permitted and officers were allowed to use hand flashlights to confer this final time over their map cases, but none of the vehicles, not even the tortured and sorely laboring artillery tractors and panzers, used headlights. Occasionally, fighting and snarling and clawing its way through a muddy cut-up ditch, one of the panzers flung a trail of angry sparks from its exhaust, and then, drawn in briefly from the fog and the dark edge of the woods, the half-faces of two, three, or a dozen of the quarter of a million waiting soldiers became half visible, like wicked woodcutters or honest charcoal burners or lost children staring out of one of the night forests of the Brothers Grimm.

SS Hauptscharführer Franz Koerner had brought his jeep into place, as scheduled and in good order, at the rear of the Sixth Panzer Army’s main column. “You can get out and stretch now if you like,” he said in English. “But don’t go far away. I’ve got a hunch we might move up a mile or so more before the jump-off.” It sounded all right to him; a lot better after five years than it might have been.

Unteroffizier Tannenbaum, sitting in the other front seat, beside him, rotated some of the stiffness out of his shoulders. “It’s drier here,” he said, also in English.

“Drier here what?” Hauptscharführer Koerner asked quickly.

“Drier here Captain,” Tannenbaum answered with a trace of weary patience.

“Or drier here sir,” the Hauptscharführer reminded him relentlessly. “And don’t you damned well forget it.”

“Yes, Cap’n-boss, sah. Ah sho’ ’nuff reads y’all loud en’ cleah. Oui, mon capitaine. Jawohl, mein Hauptsturm—”

“Sergeant Foster!” Franz would have liked to laugh, just for the hell of laughing again; Erich was forever almost making him laugh and he was forever having to check himself. He made his voice hard and menacing; in deference to the tacit understanding that had grown between them during the last seven weeks the Unteroffizier straightened in his seat and spoke now with full military solemnity.

“Sir?”

“What’s your first name, Sergeant?”

“Roger, sir. Full name Roger Harding Foster.”

“Serial number? Quick now.”

“One one eight nine six four four seven.”

“That’s up in the eleven millions. Let me see your dog tag.” Franz paused a few seconds. “You sure got in late, didn’t you, Sergeant? Where’d they find you? In the canebrakes?”

“Look soldier, I don’t have to take—”

“What’s your home town?” Franz snapped.

“Philly.”

“Where’s Independence Hall?”

“Sixth and Chestnut.”

“Who’s your most famous citizen?”

“I guess you’d have to say old Connie Mack.”

“What’s your outfit?”

“Artillery Observation, Forty-Second Infantry Division. Attached to First Battalion, Nine Twelve Regiment.”

“Whose artillery do you expect to observe back here? Don’t you know you’re thirty miles behind the front?”

“I got news for you, soldier. I’m two thousand yards behind the front and so are you. Half an hour from now the front will be right here. They’ve overrun everything up there. There’s a general order to retreat. Our regiment’s wiped out. The last order we got was every man for himself.”

“Come on, come on.” Hauptscharführer Koerner half scolded and half coaxed. “You’re supposed to be scared shitless at this point.”

“Quite.” Unteroffizier Tannenbaum, alias Sergeant Foster, slumped down in the seat again, thrust his hands into the pockets of his GI combat jacket, and lapsed defiantly into the mildly sardonic tone he had been using when the conversation began. “Quite. The funny thing is that if we do get to that point, I will be scared shitless.” Then he said in German, though the use of German was now explicitly forbidden, “Look, Franz, I can’t promise much. But I won’t forget my lines. I promise that.”

“Well, that’s something.” Franz spoke in German also. He could not see the round, intelligent cynical face of his companion, but it warmed him strangely to think that a flicker of unaffected anxiety must have crossed it just now; the whisper of the confessional was clearly audible in Tannebaum’s voice.

“How about you, Corporal Christiansen? Do you want to stretch?”

The perfectly disciplined voice of SS Rottenführer Lemmering responded at once from the seat directly behind. “I think I’ll just stay here a while, sir.”

“PFC Lachaise?”

“He’s asleep, sir,” Rottenführer Lemmering said, disposing only momentarily of that particular problem. It was hard enough to think of Grenadier Gotthold Preysing being mistaken for anyone in the world but Grenadier Gotthold Preysing of Hamburg; the weird lottery that had designated him as PFC Henri Lachaise of New Orleans and wiped away the last trace of an excuse for his incurable Gotthold Preysingness was like piling one impossible accident on another. When Preysing, with innocent pride, had displayed the dog tag in the barracks at Grafenwöhr, Hauptscharführer Koerner had stridden to the orderly room to see what could be done. “Sir,” he had tried to explain to the busy Wehrmacht major in charge of documentation and orientation, “if we could just find a Germanic name for Grenadier Preysing. Or at least an Anglo-Saxon one. There are lots of German accents in America. Where I come from sir, in Yorkville—”

“I don’t care where you come from, Hauptscharführer.” The Wehrmacht rarely had so rich a chance to pull rank on the SS. “I’m busy with more important matters and can do nothing.”

“Jawohl, Herr Major.” Franz’s impeccably correct salute admitted defeat.

But the problem of Grenadier Gotthold Preysing, the putative PFC Lachaise, could not be dismissed so simply. At that stage, before they had even heard the code words Operation Greif and Operation Einheit Stielau, the only two things they knew for certain were that they were to function as a four-man unit with Hauptscharführer Koerner in charge, that they would be using American weapons and American vehicles, that they would in due course be issued American uniforms, and that they had only a very short time to bone up on or learn the American language as spoken by the American GI. The strongest rumor, and the one that gained the easiest passage through their sealed and closely guarded assembly camp, was that they were to be part of a swift-striking fifth column whose assignment, no more, no less, was to dash into Paris, seize General Eisenhower himself, and spirit him back through the American lines to Berlin. That this was feasible no one doubted. Was not their commandant the great Oberst Otto Skorzeny, to whom nothing was impossible? Was it not Skorzeny who, at the Führer’s personal order, had dropped with a handful of men on an Italian mountaintop and snatched Mussolini from his captors of the Carbinieri? Was it not Skorzeny who had swooped into Budapest to kidnap the son of the wavering Regent of Hungary? Was it not Skorzeny who, as much as any other man, had snuffed out the treasonable plot of July 20 against the Führer’s life?

Watching Skorzeny stride across the parade square, long, lean, and bursting with blond Nordic energy, Unteroffizier Tannenbaum turned his round face from the window of their barracks room. For once the perpetual little curve was gone from the corner of his mouth; for once he did not seem too wise for his twenty-three years; for once his manner was as boyish and eager as it should have been.

He and Franz were in the little hut alone; they could, provided Franz didn’t object, pretend that they were back in real life again, that they were fellow-sergeants respectively of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, and that there was no need for the time being to go on play-acting at something else.

“Look at the big bastard!” Tannenbaum invited admiringly. “Whatever it’s going to be it’s no wonder they’ve called it Operation Greif.” They were talking English for practice, even though the order to talk nothing else had not yet come down. “The son-of-a-b***h looks like a greif.”

“What’s a greif?” Franz was a little envious of Tannenbaum’s unflagging erudition and seldom encouraged him to display it. But he was genuinely curious.

“I guess the English word would be griffin. Half lion and half eagle. Well, I’ll be damned!” he exploded. “Of course it’s Paris. What a fool! It’s been staring us in the face right from the start.”

“What do you mean?”

“You remember Paradise Lost, of course?” The wise little curve had reappeared and Franz knew he was about to be needled, gently and with mild affection, but still needled.

“Of course I remember Paradise Lost,” Franz said, feeling for once he was getting just a shade the best of it. “Back at dear old Winchester they wouldn’t give us our crumpets until we recited the whole God-damned thing backward.”

The trouble was that Tannenbaum had been at Winchester, for six years, and then at Oxford for two before his father packed up along with the rest of the German Embassy in London. He knew something about everything. He’d even studied theater, and when he remembered he was perfectly capable of transferring his donnish accent to any known region from Yorkshire to Alabama. It was unlikely, Franz had decided, that he’d be worth a damn as a soldier, but if he did turn out to be a soldier he’d be a magnificent asset on a mission like this, no matter where the mission might lead them.

“Of course it’s Paris!” Tannenbaum refused to allow his excitement to be dampened. “This Skorzeny is the greatest military ham since Hannibal. I’ll bet right now he’s gnashing his teeth to think that Hannibal beat him to the elephants. He’s also supposed to be an intellectual. You can bet the griffin was his idea and you can bet he was thinking of Milton. Listen! Paradise Lost! Part Two!” Unteroffizier Erich Tannenbaum flung his arm wide, commanding silence.

“As when a gryphon thro’ the wilderness,

With wingèd course, o’er hill or moory dale,

Pursues the Arimaspian, who, by stealth,

Had from his wakeful custody purloined

The guarded gold.”

“Get it, Franz?” Erich’s eyes were fairly prancing now.

“No.” Franz was back on the defensive, where Erich always forced him when they got away from soldiering.

“Well, you do get the business about the gryphon—the greif, that’s us and the Oberst—pursuing with wingèd course o’er hill or moory dale?”

“Go on, Professor.”

“The Arimaspian! There’s the rest of your key! You know who the Arimaspian is?”

Franz refused to be drawn into any further admissions.

“It’s Eisenhower!” Erich shouted. “That’s who the Arimaspian is. It’s Eisenhower. How could I have missed it!”

“And why is it Eisenhower?” Franz could not avoid one last question, but he made it easier by edging it with his heaviest sarcasm.

“The Arimaspians were the people who used to raid the griffins’ gold mines, just to make wreaths and garlands for their hair. What are the bloody Yanks doing, what’s Ike doing but raiding Germany, raiding all Europe, grabbing its gold for a crown of glory?”

“Ike’s got no hair to put it in,” Franz pointed out. Nevertheless he was impressed.

Tannenbaum had already rushed on past him. He was striding up and down between the bunks.

“I wouldn’t be Eisenhower for all the tea in China. Here we go, through the wilderness, o’er hill or moory dale. Allons, les enfants de la pa-ha-trie, lala lala tum-tum-tum TUM.” He stopped in mid-flight. “You’ve been to Paree?”

“No,” Franz said. “They chased my outfit right on past.”

“Ah, yes,” Erich said sympathetically. “You are of the fighting forces. An enviable distinction. For my part I was forced after the blitz and conquest of France to spend almost two years in Paris. They exiled me to a demeaning existence as chief steward of an officers’ club on the Rue des Italiens. There were of course compensations. In return for certain unscheduled favors to certain high-ranking officers I was able to obtain fairly frequent leaves to Berlin. And of course the rations, even when I was confined to the veritable hell of Paris, were at least bearable. Yes, one might say very bearable.”