CHAPTER ONE-3
1915 Words
“Perhaps he was merely doing his duty.” Franz was vaguely aware that this was a party cliché too. He was also aware that clichés weren’t necessarily untrue.
“Terror has broken better men than my father,” Tannenbaum reflected forlornly. “But what a cruel joke to make the bargain of Faust and then have the devil go back on his end of it. My father was so afraid of death that he allowed his life to lose all meaning and then he lost that, too.”
“That’s a tragedy,” Franz said shortly. “Wars are full of tragedy.”
“Granted,” Tannenbaum said more cheerfully. “I merely wanted to explain why, although I’m more or less resigned to fighting this one, I can’t pay homage to it.”
“Just watch it from now on.” Franz was friendly again. “We’ll both be better off that way.”
Tannenbaum, his spirits apparently restored in full, began whistling “Auprès de ma blonde.”
“What are we going to do about Gotthold Preysing?” Franz was now wholly businesslike.
“What indeed?” Tannenbaum whistled a bar or two of the song.
“Don’t forget you’re deputy leader of this detachment,” Franz reminded him. “If anything happens to me you take charge. What are we going to do about Gotthold Preysing?”
“Treat him as a shellshock case,” Tannenbaum counseled. “If anybody intercepts us, tell Gotthold just to roll his eyes and start gibbering.”
“I don’t know whether you’re serious or not. It’s a damned serious matter. We may really be in Paris capturing Eisenhower. Or God knows where else doing what. If we’re stopped I can get by. So can you if you’ll quit trying to be so God-damned clever. Lemmering’s accent isn’t perfect but with a cover name like Christianson he can pass for a Danish-American. But Preysing with the cover name of Henri Lachaise—”
A shadow passed over Franz’s lean, tough, wind-burned face. Tannenbaum spoke in alarm. “Look, Franz! He’ll be all right. You’re not thinking—”
Franz looked at him without expression and spoke in the stiff careful language of an SS marching order.
“Nothing that can be prevented will be allowed to jeopardize our mission.”
“He’s such a nice little bastard.” Tannenbaum was on the edge but not quite across the edge of desperate earnestness, as though desiring to plead something but half afraid to plead, lest in doing so he magnify the danger he was pleading against.
“Where the hell did he get what he thinks is his English?” Franz was no more willing than Erich to spell out the harder, ultimate question.
“You’ve never really talked to him, have you, Franz?”
“I’d like to, but he seems scared of me.”
“Well, he is. He’s scared of both you and Lemmering. He’s heard so many stories about the SS. I guess that’s why he talks to me so much. He shows me pictures of his family—two plump little buck-toothed daughters, one son old enough to be in the Luftwaffe.”
“How did the Army let him in for this?”
“The poor little guy fought his way in. He was an interpreter for Cunard in Bremen for nearly fifteen years. That’s where he got most of his English, the rest came from school. He never had any complaints about it before.”
“Gotthold would be perfect,” Franz conceded sourly, “if we were running steamship excursions to New York. But I doubt if that’s what Oberst Skorzeny has in mind.”
“Anyway, Gotthold, unlike me, is a one-thousand-per-cent, dyed-in-the-wool, honest-to-God volunteer.” Tannenbaum went on. “Originally he was in one of the stomach divisions. Leaving the state of his innards aside, just being in a stomach division was like being in hell. Poor Gotthold wants to be a hero even worse than I don’t. Well, the diet helped his ulcer quite a bit and between that and the shortage of reinforcements he got transferred a couple of months ago from the stomach division to a Volksgrenadier division. They used him there on PW interrogation. His Cunard-line English was fine for that and he got quite a reputation for it. So when Greif came up they told him about it; naturally he leaped at the chance. Who can guess how he got through the final screening here? Somebody must have been drunk.”
“But what do we do with him?” Franz repeated stonily. “They won’t let me replace him. If we could even get him another name, another identification tag, if we could make him a Cincinnati Dutchman named Schultz—but my God, Henri Lachaise!”
“Look, Franz, don’t give up on him yet,” Tannenbaum said quickly. “Let me see what I can do. He keeps showing me those God-damned pictures of his wife and kids and then hinting that we Wehrmacht men must stick together or you SS bastards will throw us to the wolves and—”
“All right,” Franz cut in curtly. “Do what you can with him. But remember what I said. Preysing starts out with us, I have no control over that. But nothing I can prevent will jeopardize our mission. Nothing, Sergeant Foster. Nothing at all.”
Franz still had a last-minute hope that they’d weed Gotthold Preysing out in the daily classes of English instruction and review. But the officer in charge, a former language professor from Westphalia, had a schoolmaster’s ear for words and no ear at all for sounds. He asked Grenadier Preysing one question only.
“State your rank and name.”
“Brivate Virsst Klass La Dgjass, Ennrig,” Gotthold replied.
“Jawohl,” the professor said absently. “Not bad. A little too hard on the consonants. Practice in your barracks room the consonants. Next man. State your rank and name.”
The professor yielded to the professor’s old temptation to lean on his star pupils, and Gotthold was called on for no further performances in public. When Oberst Skorzeny or one of the other senior officers dropped in to see how things were going, the professor focused the drill on Franz or Erich or on the former merchant seaman from Baltimore, the former mechanic from Montreal, the former bus boy from Cincinnati, and the dozen other pupils whose English had not come solely from books and classrooms.
“Achtung!” the professor would shout, bringing them to their feet.
“Kommando zurück,” the visiting officer would order companionably. As the class sat down again, the professor would ask, “Shall we proceed, Herr Oberst?”
“By all means, and you might as well call me Colonel.”
“Yes, sir.” The professor would pretend to survey the class at random and then he’d point, perhaps, toward Erich. “That man in the third row, translate the two commands you have just heard and acted on.”
Erich would be on his feet, poker-faced. “Achtung: Attention. Kommando zurück: As you were.”
“Good. What is Weitermachen?”
“Carry on.”
“Gewehr ab!”
“Order arms!”
“Weggetreten!”
“Dismissed!”
“Stahlhelm?”
“Helmet.”
“You may sit down. Now we try some military slang. German slang into American slang. We place great stress on this part of the course,” the professor would explain to the visiting officer, trying to suppress a beam of self-satisfaction. “Ah, let me see. We’ll try the man over there at the left of the second row.” This would probably be Franz or the bus boy from Cincinnati.
“Horchkussus maken?”
“Hit the sack.”
“Arschloch?”
“Bloody fool.”
“Frikandellenfriedhof?”
“Belly.”
“Wuhling?”
“Snafu. Foul-up.”
“Getrankeobervormann?”
“Lush. Drunk. Soak.”
“Good.” The professor might turn to the officer again, smiling with a fellow-officer’s delicacy. “Do you mind, sir, if we—er—”
“No. No. I’ve had a certain amount of experience, Major.”
“The man on the aisle in the fourth row. Blech?”
“Balls.”
“Scheisse?”
“Crap.”
“Puff?”
“Cat-house.”
“Pinkeln?”
“Piss.”
Most of their time on parade was spent on heavy PT, in practicing maintenance on their jeep, and in dismantling, reassembling, and firing their American small arms. Franz was issued a Tommy gun and Erich and the other two members of their squad with M-1 rifles. In addition Franz was given a complete set of millimeter-to-the-kilometer maps of the entire Western front from Arnhem on the north to Colmar on the south. “I don’t know our sector yet myself,” the Sturmbanführer who handed them out said. “When they tell us they’ll give us other maps. In the meantime study these carefully.”
They were, of course, confined to their heavily guarded barracks area and weren’t allowed to send mail out. Sometimes there was a moving picture in the recreation hall and on one improbable Saturday night the wet canteen struck a swift, brief gusher of Löwenbrau (whether it was wholly genuine, pre-1942, pre-Stalingrad, pre-Alamein, pre-Pearl Harbor, pre-Second Front Löwenbrau was a subject of much debate; the young soldiers had never known real Löwenbrau and the old soldiers were no longer sure they could trust their memories). Most evenings the four men lounged around their little squad room in a state of domestic informality. The wood stove—for the first time in months there seemed to be no shortage of either fuel or rations—glowed reassuringly between the two double-tiered bunks. Rottenführer Lemmering, who had once worked in the Ford assembly plant at River Rouge, Michigan, spent hours studying the manual on the jeep and breaking down, cleaning, and oiling the Tommy gun and the M-1s. Franz studied his maps. The Eisenhower rumor fitted the maps and the mysterious preparations as well as any of the other rumors fitted. Franz dismissed the one that said they were to make a dash for the Channel coast and liberate the German garrison imprisoned at Calais, nor could he make much of the one that insisted there was to be a full-scale multiarmy drive for Antwerp to slice the Allied forces in two and cut off their best supply port. The first seemed to offer too small a prize, the second too impossible an effort. He was on the verge of agreeing with Erich that they were indeed making ready to pursue the Arimaspian.
While Franz proceeded with these private speculations, Unteroffizier Tannenbaum devoted most of his spare time to an equally doubtful project. Erich was making a desperate and oddly chivalrous attempt to get Gotthold Preysing ready for Der Tag. Preysing accepted his help reluctantly. Having been at first so full of cheerful complacency, he was now deep in gloom and self-mistrust; everybody made fun of his English, even the illiterate ex-convict from St. Louis who’d been discovered in the Todt labor organization and the suspected pansy who’d once been a clerk for American Express in Vienna.
“I don’t think we’re getting anywhere, Sergeant Foster.” Gotthold was at least growing accustomed to his own and the others’ noms de guerre.
“Of course we are, PFC Lachaise. Don’t forget, for all we know Der Tag may be still a month away, perhaps two months away. Now, just try to remember the three things. Watch my mouth when I form the words before you. Soft always on the consonants. Try to get the sound more through the nose and less from the throat.”
Gotthold kept glancing nervously toward Hauptscharführer Koerner, busy with the maps, and Rottenführer Lemmering, busy with the guns. Quite clearly his apprehensiveness was growing by the day. It added to his demoralization to have his weakness constantly on parade before the two frightening SS men. It could be sensed that he’d gladly have forefeited his fading dream of glory to be back in the puny sanctuary of the stomach battalion.
“Now, slowly,” Tannenbaum would coax him. “I say the German. You say the English. Ready?”
“Hchreddy.”
“First word. Now think carefully. Frass.”
“Jow?” Gotthold would venture hopefully.
“Chow. Try it again.”
“Jow.”
“That’s better. Flutterluke.”
“Mouth.”
“Perfect! Damn’ good work, PFC Lachaise. Angst.”
“Zgaredt.”
“Scared.” Tannenbaum was as gentle as a mother.
“Zgaredt.” By now Gotthold was usually sweating.
“Now here comes the big one again. Take your time, PFC Lachaise. Figgen.”
“Fock.”
“Not quite. Watch me while I say it and listen carefully.”
Then Gotthold would try again.
“Fugg.”
“Not quite. Listen again, PFC Lachaise.”
Gotthold would listen again, think again, bring a desperate frown to his desperately concentrated face and say carefully:
- Writer
