The Edit Page 11

  It was a warm day, but for obvious reasons, the flaps were all down on our trucks. Under the canvas, it was sweltering and most canteens of water were quickly emptied. Cow kept me from immoderate use as he sensed it would be a long trip with no stops. Some of the others followed our example; most, however, thought us fools for suffering needlessly. Surely we would stop soon. It was inhuman not to.

  It was late afternoon by the time we finally stopped. For eight hours we had been cooped up in the truck, and our legs had turned to mush sitting confined so long. When the sergeant threw open the back flap we stumbled out of the truck, blinking into the sun. What greeted us outside was an expanse of rolling, sparsely wooded countryside. Farming country, with not a trace of human habitation nearby. Flies buzzed angrily overhead; I could hear a lark in the distance melodious and pure. It was like landing somewhere in the steppes, I said to Cow.

  “Or in the middle of Poland,” he replied as a second transport with more of Redux men pulled up alongside us, raising a cloud of dust.

  I looked at Cow, shocked at first. He smiled, but not to minimize the suggestion. Things fitted together in my head quickly then. A little later, just as Sergeant Prokop began to fill in the particulars, the penny dropped. The truth of the matter finally became apparent to me. I was amazed I had not seen it all along.

  Cow and the rest of the thirty or so men in Wehrmacht uniforms were led off down a dusty dirt road into the setting sun. At the tail of his column, Cow suddenly turned and waved to me, a gesture very out of character for him. The rest of us, in Polish kit, remained where we were, wishing we could be with the others. After all, no one chooses to be on the losing side, even in play.

  Dry rations were broken out and we partook of these gratefully. There was also a new ration of water passed around; it seemed this had been kept stored under the very benches of the transport where we had sat so long. (Which rather brings to mind a tasteless bit of humor my Miranda was fond of repeating: “I could have passed my life in near starvation in our run-down village if I hadn’t finally realized that I was sitting on a gold mine.” She would always slap her delicious little bottom as she said this, in case any listener misunderstood.)

  While we drank thirstily and then ate, Sergeant Prokop further detailed the plan for us. Until nightfall, we were to stay in position where we were, just inside the German border. There was an audible sigh at that statement, for most of us had thought as Cow had, that we were already inside Poland, and we had been waiting for the Polish border patrols to chance upon us. By cover of darkness, we would move west, toward a small forestry station at a place called Hohenlinden. We had been assured that the German couple who habituated there had been removed. We, disguised as a band of marauding Polish army regulars invading the Reich, were to shoot the place up, perhaps even start a fire, and eventually be surprised in our villainy and exchange fire with Wehrmacht troops, who were, in reality, group Redux. The point was, our leader stressed, this would be friendly fire. We were to return it by shooting into the sky; our rifles were never to be aimed parallel to the ground. As he put it, we wanted no balls up here, no freakish accident of German killing German.

  Theatre, I thought. Pure and simple. A child of Vienna, I had a sense for that art form, all right. No “balls up” indeed. Especially when I was wearing the wrong color uniform. With Cow gone, however, I had no one in which to confide these thoughts.

  We would, Prokop went on, be taken prisoner by the German troops, and then be transported quickly out of the region. All this just in case any of the locals stumbled onto our game. This had to look real. No German was to be spoken. Only the few words of Polish we had. The forestry hut was close to a village, but far enough from the border that we would not attract the attention of bona fide Poles on border patrol.

  Private Schmidt, one of the few men I ever met who exactly filled the Nazi description of the perfect Aryan specimen, and who was still a bit miffed at being chosen as a Pole despite his blond good looks, now spoke up: “But if we’re carted out of the area, what proof will there be that the raid ever took place?”

  “The burned forestry hut for one,” the sergeant said. He had asked for questions, yet seemed loath to answer this one. “Also, there will be certain … incontrovertible proof left behind for the press.” Prokop did not look us in the eyes as he spoke.

  Schmidt pressed the point, but the sergeant was finished with question-and-answer time. For the next hour, we sat around smoking and growing more and more nervous. This would be the first action, staged or not, that most of us had ever experienced.

  I do not think I shall ever forget that sunset: It seemed to go on forever with the sun turning blood red as it finally slipped down over a far knoll to the west. Atop the knoll was one lone sycamore tree, its bark changing to brilliant red in the dying light, and the sun appeared to melt or drip onto the question mark of that tree. None of us really wanted to see the sun go away, for that would signal the beginning of our adventure, and it was as if the communal will of us twenty young men held the glowing orb suspended above the earth. There was something powerful yet terrifying in the exercise of this communal spirit and will, a manifestation of Volksgemeinschaft, for it was unspoken yet recognized by one and all.

  It was just the other side of this knoll, Sergeant Prokop said as he investigated his map, that we would find the forestry station. This gave a double import to that tree and the fading sun.

  When finally we moved out, there was not a man among us who did not feel an incredible sense of relief at finally doing something. The waiting had taken its toll on us. The evening was full of the sound of crickets and the occasional high-pitched hoot of a field owl on the hunt. A sweet earthy smell came up with the cooling of evening, carried on a slight breeze. I was grateful for the coolness, for I had not stopped sweating since early in the morning upon first donning my uniform. Moonless, the night sky was sprinkled with stars undimmed by artificial lighting anywhere on the horizon. We followed the dusty track that earlier I had watched Cow tramp along.

  I was pleased to be walking. Sergeant Prokop occasionally barked out orders in Polish, just in case some farmer was out late in his fields. Up the distant knoll, we marched, past the sycamore shaped like a question mark, and then down the other side into a copse of chestnut trees. Ahead of us, we finally discerned the black silhouette of a building, massive and solid in the darkness, its blackness even deeper than that of the night. That darkness could take on such a visible manifestation was a discovery to me, unaccustomed as I was to moving about in it. This was a revelation, this understanding of the relative mass of light. I still remember the slight shock. I was elevated to another plane by the realization: slight irony implicit here, for most reports of such peak experiences mention the accompaniment of white light. From Swedenborg to Gurdjieff, this inclusion of white light is pretty much standard drill. My revelation was accompanied by the opposite—darkness as black as the uniform of the corps.

  For a brief instant, I was not a plodding foot soldier heading for his battle, but rather a messenger of some higher consciousness, in tune with all around me: the trees, the darkness, the very slope of the hill. They were a part of me, I of them. It was the glorious world unity achieved when one is doing one’s duty totally, faithfully, from the heart. So far removed was I now from the callow cynicism and selfishness that had initially prompted me to join the Staffel. I had become now one of the unit; I had found my mission in life.

  My reverie was sharply halted by the crack of rifle fire. The man in front of me jumped backward into my chest, knocking us both over like bowling pins. I spluttered a protest and started to shove him off me, but my hand came away wet with a warm sticky substance I knew at once to be blood. I rolled his body off me and it made a gurgling sound. He had been shot in the throat. Blood pumped freely from the wound. This I could see despite the darkness. Flies or mosquitoes buzzed over my head and something struck the ground nearby. Thwu
mp. I realized these were not insects but bullets, and I stayed down. I had no time for reflection, but knew I must get off the exposed roadway and find protective cover in the woods. I rolled several times and then crawled on my belly off the road. I could not make out where the fire was coming from at first. I felt only dizzy and disoriented, rather helplessly clutching the foreign rifle to my chest as if it were a crucifix and I a boy of seven waiting for First Holy Communion. Another body rolled onto me. It turned out to be Schmidt, the asker of uncomfortable questions. His presence, normally an aggravation to me, was now quite reassuring.

  “It’s coming from the fucking house.”

  It took me a moment to realize what he meant. Then I saw the orange-red explosions of shots being fired from windows in the forestry station.

  “The bastards!” Schmidt shouldered his gun and shot into the blackness in the general direction of the building.

  It was something to do; action as opposed to inaction. It removed the impotent fear brought on by only reacting to the situation. Shouldering my rifle, I felt I was putting a template onto events. I was taking charge. The first shot recoiled painfully against my slack shoulder, for we had been given little drill in weapons use. I cried out aloud and Schmidt thought momentarily that I’d been hit. I braced my shoulder thereafter.

  I doubt that we exchanged more than a hundred rounds on both sides. Strangely, I gave no thought to who might be firing on us. In Germany, the “enemy” was obviously other Germans, yet this thought did not arise in the several minutes of the battle’s duration. It was enough that they had fired on us, shooting at least one of our number. This made them, whoever they might be, the enemy.

  I must have fired off a good dozen rounds, all that was in my clip, and then ejected it and inserted a second, but held my fire as shooting from the forestry station seemed to have stopped. I sensed movement to our left. Voices. Confused shuffling of feet. It seemed the rest of our comrades were in retreat. I did not want to call out in case these sounds were not from friends but from those who had opened fire on us. I heard the choked gurgling of the man lying on the road. He had not yet died and I wanted him to so as to still his grotesque sounds.

  There came a loud voice, almost familiar. I could not make out exactly what it was saying, but there was authority in it. The tone was both reassuring and frightening. I made sure the second clip was securely inserted and held my rifle at the ready. Schmidt broke wind in a most ungracious manner and did not even bother to apologize. I had the urge to move away from him and his fetid innards but did not want to make any noise. The voice grew louder and then there was a body attached to it. At that very moment, more shots rang out from the house and Schmidt let off several rounds, giving away our positions. I heard heavy footfalls approaching us.

  “Stop shooting! Cease fire!”

  It was the same authoritarian, vaguely familiar voice. And then I saw the gun and the uniform. It was not ours. It had been a trap. I swung around to the approaching figure, leveling my rifle straight at his middle. He continued to approach, his voice booming out in the night. Stumbling over the wounded man in the road, he came lurching across the road toward us. My finger pulled off two rounds: the first one spun him full circle and the second sat him down hard on his ass as he held on to his bleeding middle.

  It was only then, recognizing the characteristic slump of the shoulders as he sat, that I realized with a visceral shock that it was Cow.

  Well, to paraphrase Sergeant Prokop, it certainly was a balls up. The worst had happened: We of the Staffel volunteers had fired upon each other, and for real. There were casualties and confusion. The first imperative was to clean up the mess before our border patrol should stumble upon us. We had no idea what was happening or what had gone wrong. All we knew then was that we had to clean up and clear out.

  Only later did we get the news. The invasion of Poland, Operation White, of which Operation Himmler was only a small part, had been called off at the last minute. Hitler had canceled it because of startling news: That very day, the British had formalized their mutual defense treaty with Warsaw, and that prompted the comic buffo statesman Mussolini to go back on his assurances to the Führer that he would come to the aid of the Reich in case of war. Hitler thus had no choice but to call off the Polish invasion—for the time.

  This decision, however, came at the eleventh hour, quite literally, and too late to stop our groups from moving into place. The old couple from the forestry building had thus not been evacuated as planned, and the old man, hearing our movements in the middle of the night, expected the worst. Seeing the uniform of one of our number who had gotten close to the building, the forestry man had opened fire with a World War One Mauser, starting the firefight in which groups Redux and Viktor—stumbling toward each other in the darkness—quickly became involved.

  This was a setback, but not a total failure. The operation had not been discovered, despite all the confusion of the night of August 25–26. We of the Staffel were still in shape to go through with another staged raid when the Führer decided the time was ripe. We did not have to wait long. Five days, in fact. Hitler had, by now, had time to assess the new situation: Mussolini had been brought around, and if, now, the Poles were backed up by a written agreement with London, so what? It was worth the risk that the spineless English would not go to war over a simple border dispute.

  There were also outside urgencies at work: The fear of autumn rains was one, as mentioned before. But more important was a further outside exigency: 1939 was the year of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. He was determined to begin the war in Europe—the cleansing war—that he knew it needed. It should begin when he was at his half-century mark so that he would have time to lead it to completion and see Germany into the millennium thereafter. Once and for all, we Germans would fight to end the vicious policy of encirclement practiced upon us by our neighbors from the time of Frederick the Great of Prussia on.

  So when word came that we would again see action the night of August 31, there was not a sad face among us. We were ready, and everything this time went according to plan. The dress rehearsal had at least accomplished one thing for us: It had made the real thing possible. We “Poles” were captured by the “Wehrmacht” troops; we put our hands over our heads and were led off to waiting troop transports. These transports were, however, not empty when we got to them. What looked to be lumps of clothing in the beds of the trucks first needed to be unloaded before we got in. But it turned out these bundles of clothing were actually bodies of men, dressed very much like we were in Polish uniforms. These men were alive; one heard a groan occasionally as they were lifted out and carried toward the Hohenlinden forestry building. A good fire had been started there now, and its flames danced up into the dark sky, a brilliant garish orange. I could see the men clearly as they were lifted out of the transports. They had the shorn hair and emaciated features like those I had seen earlier at our training camp when the food was handed them. They were, in fact, I realized with a start, the very ones I had seen just the week before.

  We all watched as these men were unloaded; other Staffel personnel whom we did not know did this business. No one looked at another, no questions were asked. The bodies had to be carried from the trucks as if they had been doped. They were taken to a grove of trees within the circle of light cast by the fire, and there propped against trees, their backs toward Poland. Once the lot of these were unloaded, we “prisoners” were ordered aboard and the canvas tops were removed so that any of the local villagers awoken by the fracas should be able clearly to see Polish prisoners of war being carted away from the scene. The trucks started up and, simultaneously, a sudden sharp roar came from the forestry building where perhaps a can of gasoline had exploded. The trucks were put into gear. Bumping down the dirt road away from the border we heard automatic weapons fire. We all heard it, but no one commented.

  Early in the morning, we invaded Poland, Hitler crying out to th
e world of the Polish atrocities in Upper Silesia, showing photos of Polish soldiers killed in this action on German soil. His speech that day was impassioned, moving, filled with outrage. I almost believed it. In two more days, the entire world was at war.

  “Hungry? I made a bean soup. … I thought the fresh air might have given you an appetite.”

  “I accept. The devil I know, I mean. On one condition.”

  “Which is? Eat before it gets cold.”

  “I want to think … to believe I can trust you. If I’m going to write off my only chance of help, I want to feel you will honor what you say. I want to understand you, to know what makes you tick. Before I write the postcard.”

  “—”

  “Is that so much to ask?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I want to read your memoirs. I want to get inside of you. Know what kind of man has power over me. Know whether you really are different from those friends of yours or not. I have to do this. I have to have some sort of feel for you. Otherwise, you might just as well call your friends in now.”

  “—”

  “It can’t matter now, can it? I mean, I know the worst. I know your name and that you are a wanted war criminal. What else matters? Why keep the memoirs from me now? The particulars are of no consequence. Either I would inform on you or not. That’s the fear, right? Tell them, the Israelis, where to find you. So you might as well let me know the full story. It can’t damn you any more than it already has. And maybe, just maybe, it will breed some understanding between us.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes, Miss O’Brien. I think I would. But this friend of yours. She is persistent. She is causing problems right now. How long will it take you to get to know me? You see, the problem is with others, not just between you and me. My friends want no complications.”