When I was a senior in high school, I was desperately in love with Nona Katz, the woman I finally married six years later.
The mere thought of parting from her for college left me desolate. I had been admitted to the Honors Program at the U., here in Kindle County. Nona, on the other hand, was never much of a student. She had been lucky to get into State, originally called. State Agricultural College, which was not an institution in the same circle of heaven as the more famous university to the north. Not to be overlooked either was the fact that my admission to the U. Honors Program included a tuition waiver and a $1,500 stipend for room and board. My parents used endless ploys to get me to go there. From Kindle County, it was no more than a five-hour drive to State, they said, even in winter weather. They promised to help me buy a used car and pay my phone bills.
"You don't understand," I told them. "You don't understand what this feels like."
"Of course not," said my mother. "How could we understand? Ours must have been an arranged marriage.
"Ma, don't be sarcastic."
"It is you, Stewart, who does not understand. I met your father at perhaps the darkest time humanity has ever known. We fully comprehend the wonder of these feelings. That is not, however, all there is to consider."
"Ma, what else matters? What's more important than love?"
My father cleared his throat and took a rare part in our debates.
"Love in the form you are talking about, Stewart, does not remain unchanged forever. You cannot lead your life as if you will never have other concerns."
I was thunderstruck by this remark. First, because my mother looked on approvingly. And second, by the sheer notion that Dad was asserting so coolly. Nona-the discovery that there was some complementary principle in the world-had lifted the stinking fog from my morbid adolescence. My father's blase assertion that love would somehow evaporate was like telling me I was going to be thrown back into a dungeon.
"You're wrong," I said to him.
"Well, consider that I may be right. Please, Stewart. Love in time takes a form more solid but less consuming. And thank the Lord! No one would ever leave the bedroom. There is work to do, families to raise. It changes, Stewart, and you have to be prepared for what happens next in life."
I did not hear much after that. It was the "thank the Lord" that always stuck with me, evidencing my father's frank relief that he had been able to escape from something as messy and demanding as passion.
And yet it was that selfsame guy I had to contemplate in the arms of Gita Lodz, so nuts with lust that he was rutting in a barn with the farm animals, and then, even more sensationally, getting it on in the bed of a nun. Yet I didn't feel as much discomfort with these scenes as I might have expected. For one thing, when you're big enough to think, on bad days, of replacing your bathroom scale with the ones they use at highway weigh stations, you accept one of life's most cheerful truths. Everybody fucks. Or at least they want to. Notwithstanding American advertisers, it's a universal franchise. The bald truth was that after several months of separation, Gita Lodz struck me as a pretty hot dish. Like my father, I've always been attracted to small women-Nona is barely five feet.
More to the point, I knew the end of the story. Mademoiselle Lodz was just a pit stop on Dad's voyage from Grace Morton to my mother. Irony being the theme song of life, middle-aged Stewart sat in the passenger lounge of the Tri-Counties Airport reading the end of Dad's account and warning young David to think twice. It was only going to turn out badly, I told him. Anticipating a train wreck, I was not surprised to see one at the end.
When I made my second visit to Bear Leach in November 2003, five weeks after our first meeting at Northumberland Manor, I wanted to know the aftermath of all the characters in my father's story. This led into the region where Bear had told me he might not be free to go, and at moments he chose his words carefully. As it turned out, there was plenty he could say about the fate of Robert Martin, and even a little about General Teedle. But asking what had happened to Gita Lodz stopped him cold. I'd brought Dad's manuscript along to illustrate my questions and Bear actually thumbed through the pages in his lap briefly, as if trying to refresh his memory when I mentioned her name.
"Well," he said finally, "perhaps it's most helpful if I give you the sequence, Stewart. I initially made an effort to locate Miss Lodz, believing she could be an important witness to mitigate your father's punishment. That was to be the principal issue at trial, of course, in light of David's intended guilty plea. Your father's service near Bastogne remained my ace. in the hole; it was amply documented in his service record, especially in the papers recommending him for the Silver Star, which was approved, by the way, in the War Department, but never awarded as a result of the court-martial. However, I also wanted to show, if I could, that David had fought beside Martin. It would not excuse letting Martin go, but any soldier worth his salt who sat on the court-martial panel would understand an act of mercy toward a comrade-in-arms.
"Accordingly, I hoped to offer a first-person account of the incident in which your father had helped destroy the ammunition dump at the Royal Saltworks, which I learned of when I interviewed Agnes de Lemolland. I pressed the Army for the whereabouts of all the persons who had worked on that operation.
"When I informed your father about that, he became extremely agitated. 'Not the girl,' he said. Since he still refused to tell me anything about what had actually transpired, this frustrated me to no end and I said so.
"It's beyond discussion,' he said. 'It would be a complete disaster.'
"For your case?' I asked.
"Certainly for my case. And personally as well.'
"And what is the personal stake?' I asked.
"He yielded slightly in his usual adamantine silence and said simply, 'My fiancee."'
I interrupted Bear. "Grace Morton?"
"Surely not. That was long over by then." "My mother?"
Leach took his time before finding his way to a dry smile.
"Well, Stewart, I wasn't present when you were born, but you say your mother was an inmate at the Balingen camp and that was certainly the residence of the woman whom your father by then intended to marry."
He studied me with his perpetual generous look to see how I assembled this information.
"So he said, my dad said, it would be a disaster if Mom met Gita Lodz? Or found out about her?"
In a typically aged gesture, Bear's mouth moved around loosely for quite some time as if he was attempting to get the taste of the right words.
"David said no more than what I have stated. I drew my own conclusions at the time. Naturally, I had a far fuller picture when I eventually read what your father had written, which you now have done, too. The personal aspects, I ultimately decided, were best left without further inquiry. But, as a lawyer, I was relieved that your father had prevailed on this point. As I have said, his judgment as a trial attorney was first-rate. Calling Miss Lodz to testify and subjecting her to cross-examination would have been very damaging for his cause."
Having read the whole story by then, I understood. Had Mademoiselle Lodz told her story, Dad's decision to let Martin go could not have been made to look like an act of charity toward a buddy from combat, not even by a trial lawyer as skilled as Leach. In fact, as Bear had said last month, it could have raised the specter of murder in the mind of an imaginative prosecutor.
But that, I figured, was the least of it. Dad might have wanted to shield my mother from the details of his recent love affair. But I was sure the person he most wanted to protect was himself. Having gone on with his life, the last thing Dad needed was to see Gita Lodz. It would have made for a moment of unequaled bitterness, sitting there, knowing he was on the express for Leavenworth, while he looked across the courtroom at the woman who'd used every trick to abet Martin's countless escapes, including, as it turned out, dancing on my father's heart.
I was aware that Bear was watching me closely, but I was in the full grip of the illusion that I finally had some insight into my father, and had suddenly harked back to Dad's advice when I was eighteen. In telling me to base my college choice on something besides the bulge that arose in my trousers at the first thought of Nona, Dad, I saw, was speaking from experience, rather than his native caution. He wanted to keep me from taking my own helping of a dish that had been served cold to him decades ago by Gita Lodz.
Out side the former French Army garrison building which had been used as a civilian hospital in Saint-Vith, Biddy and I awaited the organization of a posse of MPs, while I smoked in the cold. The fighting had taken an enormous toll on this town, too. Almost nothing remained standing. The hospital had survived only because of the huge red crosses painted on its roof.
The Provost Marshal Lieutenant who had surrendered Martin to the nice-looking little nurse was abject when he learned that the Major was a wanted man, but he insisted they could not have gotten far. The explosion in December that had leveled the lodge had also blown off Martin's left hand and a piece of his thigh, as well as layers of hair and flesh on the side of his head. A month later, he still had open burn wounds and had departed from the hospital in a wheelchair.
"If we don't find them," I told Biddy, "Teedle will court-martial me. Mark my words. Showing my orders to the known consort of a spy-what was I thinking?"
Biddy cocked a brow at the word 'consort.'
"Cap," he said finally, "let's just get 'em."
My grief over my professional failures seemed trivial, however, compared to the personal devastation. I had assumed Gita would disappoint me, but I'd never imagined she would play me entirely false. One question seemed to peck at my mind like an angry crow. Was she really the new Bernhardt? Had everything she'd exhibited toward me been part of a role? Even while my heart struggled for some other solution, I could not reason my way to any answer but yes. Martin and she were the worst kind of people, I concluded, manipulators willing to prey on the softest emotions. If I saw either, I might reach for my pistol.
According to the U. S. personnel who'd taken over at Oflag XII-D, Martin had been driven off in a horse-drawn cart with a long-haired Gypsy holding the reins. A team of six MPs was gathered to search the town. Biddy and I went to the rail yard, but there were no trains moving yet, not even military ones, and it seemed impossible that Martin could have escaped via his favorite route. I took a point from that. Here in Belgium, Martin had feeble alliances. His chances were better in France-or Germany, where he could rely on what remained of his old network. Heading that way would also allow Martin to continue doing his work for the Soviets. Whichever direction he went, he would need medical attention-or at least medical supplies. And the only reliable source for them was the U. S. Army. Overall, he figured to follow Patton's forces, some of whom would remain friendly to him, especially since, at OSS's insistence, the fact that Martin was wanted was not widely known.
I cabled Camello, stating that Martin had escaped and that we wanted authority to pursue and arrest him. We received a one-word response from Teedle: "Proceed." I was still not sure which of the two I was actually searching for.
Although it was a little like playing pin-the-tail-onthe-donkey, Biddy and I chose to follow the 87th Infantry as it moved out of Saint-Vith toward Priim. We had encountered battalion commanders of the 347th Infantry Regiment in town and they had agreed to let us accompany them.
Virtually all the territory lost in the Ardennes offensive had been regained and some of Patton's elements were now mounting assaults against the massive concrete fortifications of the Siegfried line at the German border. The battle was progressing inch by inch, an advantage to Biddy and me, since it would make it hard for Martin to get far. Bidwell and I drove along just behind the fighting, going from one medical collecting company to another. By the third day, we had twice received reports of a little Red Cross nurse who'd presented herself at battalion aid stations. She'd helped minister to the wounded briefly and then disappeared with an armload of supplies.
On the front, the battle lines were constantly shifting, with each side making swift incursions and then drawing back. Several times Biddy and I found ourselves driving into firefights. However slowly, though, the Americans were gaining position and our troops were in a far different mood here than they'd been in during the Bulge. They were not simply more confident, but also hardened by being on enemy soil. Late on our third day, Biddy and I encountered an infantry platoon that had just taken a high point dominated by the house of a prosperous burgher.
A sergeant came out to greet us. "You figure this here is Germany?" he asked. I didn't know from hour to hour if we were in Belgium, Germany, or Luxembourg, but we compared maps and I agreed with his estimate. He then issued a hand signal to his troops and they rushed into the house, emerging with everything of value they could find. China. Candlesticks. Paintings. Linens. Two soldiers struggled through the door with an old tapestry. I had no clue how they even imagined they could get it back to the U. S. The homeowners had made themselves scarce but an old maid had remained and she followed the troops out, shrieking about every item, trying once or twice to grab them from the men's arms. When she would not desist, a thin private pushed her to the ground, where she lay weeping. A corporal delivered a set of silver wine goblets to the sergeant, who offered a couple to Biddy and me.
"I don't drink wine," Biddy said, which was untrue.
"Learn," the sergeant told him, and insisted on heaving them into our jeep.
We stayed the night in the house, where every man in the platoon seemed determined to consume the entire store of liquor they had discovered in the cellar. One literally drank himself into a coma. When a buddy tried to revive him by throwing schnapps in his face, the liquid splattered into the wood-burning stove in the center of the room and the flame leaped up into the bottle, which exploded. Several men were pierced by flying glass, and the couch and the carpet caught fire. The troops were so drunk they howled in merriment while they stomped out the flames, but the lieutenant in charge was irate, inasmuch as four soldiers had to be removed to the aid station.
In the morning, Biddy and I headed south. We were in American-held territory, no more than half a mile from the house, when half a dozen Germans, dressed in black leather coats and armed with Schmeisser machine pistols, leaped up from the ditches on either side of the road and surrounded the jeep. I could see they were SS, rather than Wehrmacht, because of the silver death's-heads over the bills of their caps and the Nazi runes on their coats.
My instinct was to shout out a stupidly casual remark like "Our mistake," and head the other way, but as the six came forward to disarm us, the full gravity of the situation settled on me. I had been off the battlefield ten days now, but I found it had never left me, as I suppose it never will. Within, my spirit shrunk to something as small and hard as a walnut and piped out its familiar resigned message: So if you die, you die.
They ordered us out of the jeep and drove it into a wayside of heavy bushes, marching Biddy and me behind it. As we walked through the snow, Hercules sat in the back of the vehicle, Cleopatra on her barge, surveying the scene with a struggling curiosity like the RCA hound staring into the trumpet of the Victrola. "Look at that dog," Biddy muttered, and we managed a laugh.
Once the jeep was out of sight, the Germans searched us, taking anything useful we had. Compass. Trench knives. Grenades. Watches. And, of course, Bidwell's camera. One of the soldiers looked at the lens and recognized it as German.
"Woher bast du die?" he asked Biddy.
Biddy acted as if he did not understand and the SS man raised his Schmeisser and asked the question again. Fortunately, he was distracted when the others found our store of K rations. They each tore through several boxes, tossing aside the cardboard covers with their wavy designs as they ate with feral abandon.
"Cut off from their unit?" I asked Biddy.
He nodded. They clearly hadn't seen food for days.
"Run for it?" he asked. I was still debating, when the German lieutenant came back our way and began to question me in terrible English. "Vhere Americans? Vhere Deutsch?" They obviously wanted to get back to their side.
I answered with my name, rank, and serial number. The Germans were far too desperate to be bothered with the Geneva Convention. The lieutenant motioned to two of his men, who took me by the shoulders while the lieutenant kicked me three times in the stomach. I was brought back instantly to the schoolyard, the last time I'd survived this panicked breathless moment when the diaphragm stops functioning after a blow to the gut. To make matters worse, when the air finally heaved back into my lungs, I vomited my breakfast on the lieutenant's boot. In reprisal, he struck me in the face with his gloved fist.
My vomiting seemed to catch Hercules' attention. Up until now, the deaf dog had been more interested in the discarded ration tins, but when I was hit this time, he bounded forward and started an enormous racket. He did not attack the German lieutenant, but came within a few feet, rocking back on his paws with his hot breath rising up in puffs, almost like punctuation, as he barked. The Germans immediately began glancing down the road while they futilely attempted to quiet the animal, raising their fingers to their lips, shouting at him, and finally reaching out to subdue him. When the men came after him, Hercules snapped at one and caught his hand, biting right through the leather glove as the German yelped somewhat pathetically.
There was then a single gunshot. The same SS man who'd been questioning Biddy had his pistol out. A little whiff of smoke curled up over the barrel and the dog lay in the snowy road motionless, with a bloody oval like a peach pit where his eye had been. Several of his comrades began shouting at the soldier who'd fired, afraid of the attention the shot would attract. In the confusion, Bidwell joined in.
"What the hell you'd go and do that for?" he demanded. The German soldier with the drawn Schmeisser appeared to have no idea how to respond to the berating he was receiving from all sides. When Biddy strode forward, intent on looking after the dog, the German recoiled slightly and his pistol ignited again in a short automatic burst. Gideon toppled, rolling to his back with three clean bullet holes in his stomach. It had happened so simply, with no preparation at all, and was so pointless, that my first reaction was that it could not be true. How could the world, which has always been here, undergo such a fundamental transformation in two or three seconds?
"Oh my God!" I yelled. I screamed again, one long lament, and for an instant broke away from the two men who were holding me, but they, along with the lieutenant, dragged me down into the ditch. I twisted, cursing them until the lieutenant put the pistol barrel straight to my forehead.
"Schrei nicht. Schweigen Sie. Wir helfen deinem Freund. We helf." I quieted to see if they'd aid Biddy as promised, and one of them scrambled up to the road. He was back in a second.
"Er ist tot," he said.
The lieutenant could see I understood and immediately placed the icy pistol muzzle to my forehead again. The idea of some vain act of resistance passed through my mind like a weak current. But I'd already learned on the battlefield the desperate, humiliating secret of how badly I wanted to live, and I said nothing, allowing the Germans to drag me along in despair.
With any kind of luck, we'd have encountered American troops, but it was, simply put, not a lucky day. The Germans nearby were mounting an offensive action and my captors moved toward the sounds of the battle. Near nightfall, they hooked up with a German antitank unit, which turned out to have taken a number of Allied prisoners. The unit was being redeployed and we marched at the end of their column, with our hands behind our heads. As the only officer, I was separated from the dozen or so enlisted men by the buffer of a single guard.
We were clearly inside Germany, because at one point we passed through a tiny village where several locals came out to observe us. An old woman rushed from her little house and spat on the first American in line. She was followed by another, younger woman who began to scream, while several more people stepped from their houses. Perhaps to pacify them, one of the German officers ordered us to surrender our coats to the residents. I couldn't see exactly what had happened in this town. Probably nothing different than in any other town. There were still bodies of American and German soldiers pushed to both sides of the road.
We slept that night in an open field. Another prisoner thought we were somewhere near Prum. We were each issued a worn army blanket but no food. One man, a Brit, had been a prisoner for two days now. He said this was the second time he'd been captured. The first was during Market Garden, the invasion of the Low Countries, and he'd been shipped back to a German stalag in Belgium, not all that far from here, from which he and everyone else had escaped when it was bombed. As the only veteran of captivity, he did his best to remain sunny. If I'd been in a mood to like any human being, I probably would have liked him.
"POW ain't the end of the world, mate, not by my lights. Cuisine ain't the Savoy, but there been days when I ain't et in my own army. It's those blokes out there gettin shot at are 'avin the rough time, if you ask me. This 'ere, it's just boring."
One of the enlisted men asked what the former prison camp had been like.
"Jerries are completely crackers. All day long, they was counting us, mate. Stand up. Sit down. Eins, zwei, drei. Not like they were going to give us anything. Food was bread once a day, and couple times this awful potato stew. One day the commandant comes in. 'I have Boot news and bat news. Goot news. Today each man will get a change of underwear. Bat news. You must switch with the man next to you.' Only a joke," he added.
Our laughter attracted the German guards, who stomped among us, demanding silence. Nonetheless, the talk resumed shortly. Sooner or later, we were going to be handed off to the Kraut equivalent of the MPs. The Brit didn't think we were going to a stalag. Before his capture, he'd heard that they were housing prisoners in the German cities which the Allies had begun to bomb.
This time, when the two guards heard us talking, they didn't bother with more warnings. They charged around, knocking heads with their rifle butts. I barely ducked when the soldier came at me and I took the blow with little reaction. The pain resounded. But I did not care much. Sooner or later, I realized, they'd take a proper inventory of us and notice the 'H' on my dog tag. At that point, things for me were likely to get considerably worse. But I could not hold on to any concern about that. I did not feel part of this world any longer. It was as if I had sunk one foot inside myself. I often wonder if I will ever fully return.
The Germans woke us a little before daybreak. We were issued our ration for the day, a roll to be split between two men.
"Eat it now," the Brit said. "Someone will steal it, if you try to save it."
As the guards got us to our feet, the SS lieutenant who'd put the gun to my head passed by. He looked at me and then came over.
"Wie geht's?" he asked, manifestly more at ease now that he was back among his own. He thought I spoke more German than I did. I'd been muddling along with my grandparents' Yiddish, and I answered only with a shrug. Even at that, I felt I was a coward. He had perfect blue eyes and he looked at me a moment longer. "Bald schiessen wir nicht mehr," he whispered and gave me a weary smile. He was saying that the shooting was going to be over soon, and didn't seem to hold any illusion he would be on the winning side.
We marched most of the morning. I don't know where the Germans thought they were headed, probably to bolster more of the troops we could hear fighting, but they never got there. As we passed a wood, an American armored cavalry unit appeared out of nowhere. Six Shermans rolled in literally from every direction with their big guns leveled. The German commander surrendered without a shot. Apparently, he had the same view of the war's progress as the lieutenant.
The American troops rushed forward. The Germans who'd been our captors were forced to their knees with their hands behind their heads, while we were greeted like heroes. Two of the men who'd been prisoners had minor wounds, and they were whisked off for medical attention. The rest of us were loaded on a truck and transported to the regimental headquarters, while the Germans marched at gunpoint in the rear. This was the 66th Tank Regiment of the 4th Armored Division. While most of the division had been allowed a respite in Luxembourg after Bastogne, these tankers had been brought in to flank the 87th Infantry. They were doing one hell of a job as far as I was concerned.
Their mobile headquarters, about two miles behind the lines where we'd been captured, consisted of an array of squad tents in a snowy field. Each of the freed Americans was interviewed by regimental G-2. Since I had been the lone officer in captivity, the staff G-z, Major Golsby, interviewed me personally in his tent. He was confused about my orders, which I still had in my pocket, the only thing the Germans hadn't taken.
"I have to go back to Third Army JAG," I told him. If the MPs hadn't found Martin and Gita by now, there was no point in pursuing them now that they had another two days' lead time. More important, I had lost all interest in the mission. I knew as a matter of historical fact that it was my fault Bidwell was dead. My adolescent fascination with both Martin and Gita had led, as tragic errors always must, to tragedy-to combat, capture, and now Biddy's grave.
When I told Golsby what had happened to him, I realized I sounded remote. "I bawled my eyes out yesterday," I added. It was an absolute lie. I was yet to shed a tear. Instead, all my grief about Biddy had energized another of those circling thoughts, this one about why I'd never gotten around to telling him to call me David.
"They shot a POW?" he asked me, repeating the question a few times. "Unarmed? Stay here." He returned with Lieutenant Colonel Coleman, the deputy regimental commander. He looked like a former football player, big and stocky and quick to anger, and he was angry now, as he should have been, at my account of how Biddy died.
"Who did this to your sergeant? Are the men here who did this? Did we capture them?"
Coleman ordered a second lieutenant and a sergeant to accompany me through the camp to look for the SS men. The sergeant was carrying a Thompson submachine gun. The weapon was uncommon enough that I wondered if it was mine, reacquired from the Germans who'd taken it. The captured Krauts had just arrived on foot and were seated in rows with their hands clasped behind their heads. The MPs had made them remove their boots to safeguard against any effort to run. I walked up and down the rows. I had no illusions about what was going to happen.
The SS man who'd killed Bidwell saw me coming. Our eyes had found each other's almost mechanically several times in the last two days. I would steal hateful glances at him, but when his gaze caught mine, I hurriedly looked away, knowing he was easily provoked. Now it was he who turned in the other direction. He wasn't very old, I realized, perhaps twenty-one.
This one," I told the second lieutenant.
"Get up." The second lieutenant kicked the German's foot. "Get up."
The German was not going to die well. "Ich babe nichts getan." I have done nothing. He shouted it again and again.
The second lieutenant told him to shut up.
"Were there others with him?" I looked down the rows. I found three more, including the German lieutenant who had told me the shooting would end soon. He raised his perfect blue eyes to me, a single look of dignified entreaty, then cast his glance down. He had been at war too long to believe in much.
The four were marched, shoeless in the snow, back to the Lieutenant Colonel. Two of the Germans were virtually barefoot, their socks worn through at the toes.
"Which one did it?" Coleman demanded.
I pointed.
Coleman looked at the man, then withdrew his pistol and put it to the German's temple. The young SS soldier wept and shouted out in his own language yet again that he had done nothing. But he was too frightened to withdraw his head even an inch from the gun barrel.
Coleman watched him blubber with some satisfaction, then holstered his sidearm. The German went on heaving, his protests continuing, albeit in a reduced voice.
"Take them in back," Coleman said to the second lieutenant. I followed along, entirely a spectator, suddenly uncertain about what was to occur. I had been afraid that the Lieutenant Colonel was going to offer me the gun, but I had been disappointed when he decided not to pull the trigger. Now it seemed for the best.
The second lieutenant led the men behind. Coleman's tent at the boundary of the camp and ordered the four to turn around with their hands behind their heads. He looked toward me, not long enough to allow much in the way of a reaction, then pointed to the sergeant with the tommy gun, which seemed to have begun firing almost before the weapon was aimed. Afterward, I figured that the sergeant had just wanted to get it over with. A thought arose to say a word for the German lieutenant, but I didn't. The machine gun's spastic bark resounded in the quiet camp and the four Germans went down like puppets cut from their wires.
At the sound, the Lieutenant Colonel came around the tent. Coleman walked along inspecting the four bodies. "Rot in hell," he told them.
I had watched all of this, there and not there. I had been unable to move since the Germans fell. I had been so pleased by the SS man's terror. Now it was as if I was groping around within myself, trying to find my heart.
February 5, 1945
Dear Folks-
R & R in London. I have a chance at last to describe what we have been through, but at the moment I am in no mood to relive any of it. The war goes well, and I have done my part. But in thinking over everything I have seen, I cannot imagine how I will return home anything but a pacifist. Military calculations are so tough-minded-they must be, clear-eyed determinations of how to win and who must die. But employing the same kind of unsentimental reasoning, it is hard to understand how war-at least this war-has been worthwhile. The toll of daily oppression Hitler would wreak on several nations, even for years, cannot equal the pain and destruction that is being caused in stopping him. Yes, Europe would be in prison. But it is in rubble instead. And is a matter of government worth the millions upon millions of lives lost to this carnage? I came thinking that freedom has no price. But I know now that it is only life about which this may truly be said.
I send my love to all of you. I cannot wait to be with you again.
David
I returned to Third Army Headquarters in Luxembourg City on February 1, 1945. Because the Luxembourgers were regarded as inappropriately accommodating to the Germans, Patton had treated them with little sympathy and had literally turned out the elderly residents of the national old people's home, the Fondation Pescatore, taking it for his headquarters. It was a castle-size structure of orange limestone squares and, with its two projecting wings, vast enough to accommodate both the forward-and rear-echelon staffs. Colonel Maples had been favored with a third-floor salon, where invalids formerly sunned in the banks of high windows, and he was extremely pleased with his surroundings. He walked me to the glass to ensure that I saw his view of the dramatic gorge that plunged several hundred feet, bisecting Luxembourg City. The furnishings in his office, like those of others in the senior staff, had been provided by a cousin of the Grand Duc's, whose generosity only enhanced the suspicion that he had collaborated with the Germans. The Colonel took a moment to point out the gold-mottled tortoise-shell inlay on his desk and credenzas, priceless heirlooms created in the time of Louis Quatorze by the cabinetmaker Boulle. Logs blazed in the marble fireplace, beside which the Colonel and I drew up two damask-covered chairs. The contrast to the frozen holes in which I had been dwelling only weeks ago was unavoidable, but my mind seemed incapable of making anything from it. There were no conclusions, except that life and, surely, war were absurd, something I already felt as palpably as the bones within my body.
The Colonel leaned forward to clasp my shoulder. You look a little worse for wear, David. Thinner and perhaps not the same bright look in your eye." "No, sir."
"I've seen some papers for medals. You've done quite remarkably."
I recounted my failures for the Colonel. I'd lost the best man I'd met in the service and let Martin get away as the result of my own cupidity. This candor was characteristic of my exchanges with virtually everyone. I steadfastly rejected the fawning of colleagues like Tony Eisley, even while I became quietly furious with one or two people who treated me as if I'd been AWOL or, worse, on vacation. The truth was that no one's reactions pleased me. But because Colonel Maples had fought across the trenches a quarter century ago, a bit of my perpetual bitterness eased in his presence. If anything, my respect for him, never insubstantial, had increased, knowing he had volunteered to return to war. I would never do that. Nor could I imagine acquiring his avuncular grace. Today I could only picture myself as an irascible old man.
The Colonel, with his soft gray eyes, listened for a while.
"You are grieving, David. No one ever mentions that as an enduring part of war. You need some time.
I was given two weeks R & R. Most officers on leave retreated to Paris, where the joy of liberation was enshrined in an atmosphere of guiltless debauchery, but that hardly fit my mood. I chose London, where I found a tiny hotel room off Grosvenor Square. I had made no plans other than to sit in a hot tub for hours, and to review the foot of mail that had awaited me in Luxembourg City. I wanted to sleep, read a few novels, and when I was able, write several letters.
In retrospect, I suppose I had crossed the Channel with the unspoken thought of again being whoever I was before I'd set foot on the Continent. But the war followed me. I'd barely slept longer than two or three hours in a row since Biddy and I had first been dispatched to arrest Martin. Now I was startled to find that I could not sleep at all. I had not spent a night entirely alone within solid walls for months, and I had the feeling they were encroaching. Often I couldn't even stand to close my eyes. The second night I bought a bottle of scotch. But several belts did not make things any better. The ghouls of war took control. Each time I drifted off some panicked sensory recollection raced at me-the keening of incoming artillery, the sight of Collison with his intestines in his bloody hands, the three holes in Biddy's stomach, the earthquake and thunder of the 88s, or the unbearable cold of Champs. And always there were the dead and, worse, the dying, screaming to be saved.
In the aftermath of all that, I guess I expected to feel some gratitude for being alive. But life had been a far sweeter affair without being confronted by the dread of extinction. I had become so accustomed to being afraid that fear was now a second skin, even in the relative safety of London. I awaited artillery blasts in the parks, snipers in every tree. I was ashamed of my fear, and frequently angry. I wanted to be alone, because I was not sure I could treat anyone else decently.
The letters I expected to write came hard. So much seemed beyond words. I wrote to Biddy's family for more than two days, draft after draft, and ended up with something barely longer than a note. I found it impossible to describe the bathos of his death, hoping to comfort a dog, after summoning such valor on so many prior occasions. The only solace I could offer was to enclose hundreds of his photographs which I'd gathered from his belongings. I promised to visit the Bidwells, if I was lucky enough to return alive. In the days that I had composed and recomposed this letter, I had envisioned putting the pen down at the end and, in utter privacy, finally sobbing. But I had never been a weeper, even in the later years of childhood, and tears still would not come, leaving me in a state of constipated agitation.
Then there was Grace. In my two days of German captivity, when the combination of Biddy's death and Gita's desertion had left me feeling certain that I was going to die of heartbreak, I'd had second thoughts about Grace. She was beautiful and brilliant and steady. The one thing I could say with utmost sincerity was that I wished that I could see her, because I had learned that presence meant everything. But without a photo in my hand I could barely bring her to mind. If we were together, if Grace were in my arms, then I might have had some chance of retrieving our life. "Here, here, here," I kept repeating to myself whenever I thought of her, feeling largely enraged that something so dignifying and eternal as love could be defeated by distance. Yet the memory of Gita, of her bare skin and the moments when we'd seemed to fuse souls, easily withstood whatever had been left behind for thousands of miles and many months. By now, I was willing to say only to my most private self that I did not fully regret Gita. I had told Biddy that I was in love with her. That seemed ludicrous. I had been the kind of fool men often were for sex. But even so, I found certain images of her recurrent and fabulously arousing. Again and again I saw her looming over me naked, stimulating me with unashamed intensity. Fantasies of how I might come to find her again in the burning ruins of Europe revolved through me, even as I sometimes begged myself not to abandon the decent life I knew I could make with Grace. But it was not a time for logic. I desired Gita against all reason, and my inability to control my passions seemed part and parcel of the harsh season I was experiencing within the narrow cold confines of my room.
I made it a point to walk as much as I could, but even on the London streets I found my thinking little more than a procession of spotlighted theater scenes, in which various figures, the dear and the dead and the dreaded, made unpredictable leaps onto center stage. Often I saw Robert Martin and Roland Teedle there. In most moods, I hated both of them for letting loose the torrent of events in which I was now drowning. In better moments, I realized that one of the barriers to righting myself was the fact that I still did not know which of them to believe. I despised Martin for his deceptions, but I remained unconvinced at the deepest level that the man I had seen swing down into the Seille like a real-life Jack Armstrong would stoop to spying. Even at this late date, some part of what I'd been told seemed untrue, and that in turn seemed to emanate somehow from the core of uncontrolled excess I'd always sensed in Teedle. Amid all the disgraces I'd suffered, my doubts about the bona fides of the commands that had led me to peril and ruin seemed intolerable.
My tours around the West End took me several times down Brook Street. I recalled the address from Teedle's order to Martin to return to London. What I found at number 68, a block from the U. S. Embassy and across the street from Claridge's, was an ordinary West End row house, with a dormered fourth floor, a limestone exterior on the ground level, and a roofed entryway. This presumably was the OSS, or at least one arm of it. There was no plate identifying the building's occupants, but after passing by a few times I noticed enough foot traffic in and out to convince me that an organization of one kind or another was housed there, and on my fifth or sixth morning in London, I unlatched the iron gate and walked up to the door. Inside, I asked the tidy middle-aged receptionist if I could speak to Colonel Bryant Winters. I gave her my name.
"Regarding?"
"Major Robert Martin." The faintest lick of reaction trickled into her bland face. I was directed to a straight-backed chair across the way. She had other business to occupy her, but eventually spoke into her phone.
I'd had very little notion of the OSS before I'd been assigned to Martin's case, but its mythology had grown in my mind and those of most other soldiers in the European theater. The stories of derring-do in France, Italy, and Africa were, even if untrue, greatly entertaining, and had become staples in the constant gossip and apocrypha that provided important diversions in a soldier's day-to-day life: OSS had wiped out a battalion of German artillery to the man by poisoning their rations. Special Services agents had dropped from the sky, surrounded Rommel's tent, and spirited him back to Rome, where he was being questioned.
Within the inner sanctum, however, the atmosphere was anything but swashbuckling. It was, rather, very much like the Yale Club, which I'd once visited in Manhattan, where everyone seemed to speak with his jaw tightened and where I sensed that Jews or Catholics would always be treated with a courtesy that would never embrace complete welcome. NOK, as some of the more genteel fraternity boys at Easton were apt to put it-not our kind. The men here had good American names and many had eschewed military attire in favor of tweed jackets. Something about the milieu appalled me, especially the degree to which I knew I had once hungered after this like a hound perched beside a table. Whatever had happened to me, I was well beyond that now I was absorbed with these reflections when a tall man in a uniform presented himself. I jumped up to salute. This was Colonel Winters. He smiled like a graceful host.
"Captain, we had no word you were coming. My aide is back there thumbing through the cables, but I recognized your name. Judge Advocate, right? I take it it's the usual signal foul-up?"
I shrugged, the familiar gesture of eternal helplessness that was part of life in the Army.
"Well, come along." He had a small office with full bookshelves among the freshly painted white pilasters and just enough room for two small ebony chairs, on which we sat facing each other. His large desk was columned with bound reports. As he closed the door, he permitted himself a well-behaved laugh. "That was a bit of a stir you created. We don't have soldiers wandering in off the street to talk about our operatives."
"No, of course not. But it's official business." I tried to avoid outright lying, yet I said nothing to dispel the idea that Maples had signaled ahead of me. I simply indicated that as long as I was in London, I had decided it was best to formalize certain matters in my investigation, which had to be completed if Martin's court-martial were ever to proceed someday.
"Of course, of course," answered Winters. He was impeccable, with a long handsome face and brilliantined hair sharply parted. But he had an easy air. Despite Winters' uniform, I didn't feel as if I were in a military environment. No colonel, not even Maples, would have come to greet me, and we chatted amiably about London and then the war. He asked what I could tell him about the front. We were going to win, I said. That conviction had returned to me. I told him about the German lieutenant who had expected an end to shooting soon, but made no mention of his death.
"Good, good," said Winters. 'And tell me, then, Captain, what information is it you wish from us?"
I named several points on which direct confirmation from OSS was still required, reciting all of it in a drone meant to suggest my regrets about the punctiliousness of the law to which I was a slave. First, we needed to confirm that Martin had been ordered back to London by OSS. Second, that he had not been directed by OSS to blow the Saline Royale ammo dump when he had. Third, that Major Martin was a Soviet spy.
At the last request, Winters frowned noticeably.
"That's Teedle's word, then. That he is a Soviet Spy?,,
When I said yes, Winters reached down to fuss with his trouser cuff.
"I can confirm for you," he said, "that Martin has been insubordinate. That he has disobeyed direct orders, and conducted important military operations without final authorization. And that OSS supports his apprehension."
"And his court-martial?"
"In all likelihood. After we've spoken with him." "But not charges as a spy?"
Winters raised his eyes to a window and the trees on Brook Street.
"Correct me, Captain. Are you the one who parachuted into Bastogne?"
"There were actually two of us," I said. "My sergeant and me. And no one had to kick Bidwell in the behind to get him out of the plane."
Winters smiled. Throughout the war, OSS operatives had done things like we had. Those acts were, in fact, the calling card of the agency, and I found it a bitter irony that so many of these mild, bookish types defined themselves by those exploits. If I hadn't made that jump, Winters probably would have left me in his reception area, never bothering to receive me. But I didn't feel like a member of their club. The soldiers at the front had few illusions about what they had endured. These men, with their self-congratulations and sense of noblesse oblige, lived on their own myths and probably refused to share with one another the essential information that those who carried out their operations did so in terror. In that, Winters appeared slightly different, and was seemingly pleased I was not seeking to impress him.
"And you jumped because Teedle told you Martin was a Soviet spy?"
I no longer remembered why I had done that. Probably because I did not yet understand how terrible it was to die. But I knew a leading question when I heard one, and nodded. Colonel Winters drew his hand to his mouth.
"I have great regard for Rollie Teedle. He's a magnificent commander. There's no other brigadier general in the Army bearing that kind of responsibility. He should have had his second star long ago, but for all the rumor-mongering."
I didn't bother asking what the rumors were.
"I have no doubt that someone here offered Teedle that surmise about Martin," said Winters. "That's surely the prevailing opinion. But it's only an opinion. Candidly, Captain, no one knows precisely what Martin is up to. Certainly it's not anything we've told him to do. Which lends itself to the idea that he's serving someone else's commands. And the Russians, given his background-that's the logical conclusion. Clearly, we can't have him out there on the loose. It's a very dangerous situation."
Even I could see that. "Were there prior signs he was disloyal?"
"No, but the truth is that he'd never been put to the test. This fall Martin was given a top secret briefing back here in London concerning a project we wanted him to undertake in Germany. And the information he learned then would be of special consequence to the Soviets. He made some remarks at the time which unsettled folks here. That's why, after some second thoughts, he was ordered to return. Wrong man for the job, we decided. It wasn't until he ran off that it occurred to anyone that he'd head into the Russians' arms. But if you knew the details, you'd agree it's the most reasonable conclusion. I'm sorry, Dubin, to be so cryptic. I can't say more."
I told him I understood.
"Personally," said Winters, "I hold to a sentimental belief that these conclusions are wrong. But it's a view I keep to myself, because, frankly, I have no other explanation for his behavior."
"Anyone having any better luck finding him than I did?" I'd relinquished the search for Martin when I got back to Luxembourg City and had had no news since. Robert Martin had made nothing but misery for me. Revenge being what it is, I might have relished the sight of him in handcuffs. But I felt that the best homage I could make to Biddy was to give up the quest, without which he'd be alive.
"We'll catch up with him in time. We don't want the Provost Marshal posting an all-points bulletin that might tip the Russians. We'd like to pull Martin in quietly. But he recruited many of the contacts we have in Germany, and a lot of them are leftists, union people, whose leanings these days, as between the Soviets and the other Allies, are a matter of doubt. And beyond that, it's a difficult proposition to tell them to turn their back on the man whom they've always seen as the face of this organization. It's all rather delicate… We've had several reports after the fact. Martin's been in touch with some of his old contacts, but only asks assistance in making his way. He presents himself as on a very sensitive mission. Once or twice, he's asked to be hidden. Him and the girl."
"The girl is with him?"
"I take it you've met her. Beguiling as they say?" "In her way," I answered.
"I've never had the pleasure. She has her own legend around here. Martin recruited her out of a Marseilles hospital where she was working as an aide. A genius at playing her parts, whatever they are, and willing to do anything. Made the ultimate sacrifice, if you know what I mean, to get information out of a German officer a few years back, fellow who'd been a patient and continued to pursue her. Critical information about the bombing of London. She deserves a medal, if you ask me, but people in this building get squeamish about acknowledging those kinds of activities. Oldest trick in spying, really, sleeping with the enemy, but that's one of our dirty little secrets." He smiled, enjoying his double entendre.
He continued by telling the story I'd heard before about Gita rescuing Martin from the Gestapo by feigning pregnancy. It was fortunate Winters had gone on speaking, because I was not able to. Sleeping with the enemy. I stared at the intricate weave of the Colonel's carpet, which probably had been trod on for a century, trying to calculate what all of this meant for me. Every time I thought I'd absorbed the last from this woman there was more.
"And is she, the girl-is she with the Soviets, too?" I asked.
Winters shrugged. "Unclear. If Martin is really in this game, he might have shared his goals with no one. And then again-" He lifted a hand with elegant understatement. 'Anyway, we're a bit astray.
I stood. He offered to buy me dinner one night while I was here, but I doubted, after hearing this information, that I'd have the heart to see him. I remained vague, and said I'd ring if I found a break in my schedule.
Bad as the period before had been, Winters' news about Gita drove me into a turmoil that was even more intense, making my efforts to focus on the outer world increasingly tenuous. I walked toward Green Park and found, half an hour later, that I was still standing at the edge of one of the paths, with my hand on the cold iron railing, beleaguered by what tumbled inside me. When I looked in the mirror I saw a man of normal appearance, but it was as if that outer self was the backside of a moving-picture screen. On the reverse a movie marathon played, a never-ending splash of imagery and sound, all of it tortured. Often, as I plunged along the streets, I thought, I am having a nervous breakdown, and was propelled back to the present only by the panic that accompanied the thought.
With three days to go on my leave I packed up. Before I left, I wrote briefly to Grace. Dashed by Gita, I still could not rebound toward Grace. I would never explain why deluding myself about one woman had meant a death to my love for the other, but that was clearly the case. Grace was estimable in every way. But she was a piece of a life I would never return to. That much was concluded. And so was my time away from the service. Any further idleness would rot me. I needed work. I would head back to Luxembourg City. There would be cases to try. Men to hang.
But I sensed that even the drama of the law might fail to preoccupy me. If I remained in this abyss, there could be only one choice. I knew instantly and found not the remotest irony in my decision. I would apply for transfer to the infantry and return to combat. The desperation to remain alive, to kill rather than die, was the only reliable distraction from what was rocketing around my mind.
Only as I closed the door on the hotel room, with my duffel slung across my back, did the full import of my plans strike home, and somehow it was Gita who addressed me. I listened to her voice in the same state of fury and surrender that had tormented me for days, wanting not to hear it and hearing it nonetheless.
"You are Martin," she said.
February 11, 1945
Dear Grace, I have spent the last week in London, attempting to recover from what has transpired. After months of sharing so many impressions with you, I know how sparse I've been with details of the fighting. But there is no point to saying more. Imagine the worst. It is more awful than that. I came across the ocean, regretting that I was to be but a pretend soldier. I have been a soldier in earnest in the last months, and I regret that far more.
I now know, Grace, that I will not be able to come home to you. I feel myself damaged in some essential way I will never fully repair. I thought when I arrived here that love would survive anything. But that was one of many fabrications I carried along. For me, our sweet world has ended.
I know what a shock this letter must be. And I am crippled with guilt and shame when I imagine you reading it. But I am in a mood that seems to require me to cast off all illusions, and that includes the notion that I could return to be a loving husband to you.
I will carry you with me eternally. My regard and admiration are forever.
Please forgive me, David