No one wanted to be a hero. No one.
Not now, anyway. It was over, pretty much, or would be soon enough. That’s what everyone was saying. That’s what newspapers said and the last one most guys saw was “yesterday’s news” two weeks ago. It was true. You could taste it. You could see it in the slouched prisoners marching back, kids mostly, and old guys. They looked more relieved than depressed, more exhausted than anything else. And all those white sheets hanging out of windows.
The Army was so sure of it was over they assigned one GI for every 20, 30, Germans. Think on it. One GI with eight rounds in his M1 for 30 prisoners.
The hunt, if you could call it that, wasn’t for the enemy. Not in the minds of the guys who actually carried guns. Let the fighters hit ’em. Hell, they got paid enough and it wasn’t like there was anything left of the Luftwaffe. Let the tanks roll over them. Ditto on the Panzers if there were any of those that weren’t already burning.
The hunt was for two things, a safe end to it all and souvenirs. Souvenirs to go with a the story when the grandkids asked what Gramps did in the big war. Souvenirs to sell some goldbrick in the rear who wanted to prove something to the folks back home. Talk about grandkids was new, a good thing. It started back in February, just after the Bulge. They stayed in a convent for a night. The kids, orphans, sat in their laps, giving kisses for chocolate, brushing their soft cheeks on rough beards. That’s when it started, talk about what they’d tell their grandchildren. It was a sign of hope, a sign of confidence. It was a sign that maybe they’d make it after all.
The time for heroes was long gone.
Their sergeant told Hart and Abrams to check out the road ahead. He might have winked too, or it might have been a twitch after he suggested to the rosy-cheeked 2nd lieutenant that they might as well wait for the tanks to catch up. The tanks were just a couple of miles back. The lieutenant, West Point class of ’44, must have been taught that yelling enough would compensate for a lack of things an officer should have like experience. He screamed, “That’s an order!” until the sergeant warned him to keep his voice down as it wasn’t a secure area and a sniper had got the officer from the platoon they’d passed that morning.
It wasn’t true, but it quieted the lieutenant down. He got even quieter when the sergeant suggested that “the lieutenant” join the patrol, in back of course, for the slim chance at some real combat. The lieutenant demurred, saying something about a report due at battalion HQ. The sergeant concluded with a “Yessir,” a flip of his fingers that could have been confused for a salute, and returned to his diminished platoon.
They were on the front steps of a lightly damaged home, bullet pockmarks dotting the exterior. It was too nice to be a farmhouse, but most of the houses in Germany were better than what they’d seen in France and Belgium. White sheets were flapping from widows that once flapped swastikas. The GIs were trading loot and sharing a green bottle of something, schnapps maybe, liberated no doubt from the owners who were nowhere to be seen. The sergeant didn’t ask for volunteers. He just shrugged in front of Hart and Abrams and gave them a look that said, “Your turn,” pointing his chin down the road.
“You heard him. Just don’t listen too much,” he whispered with a smile. “Walk slow, stick to the ditches, and stop after a couple of hundred yards. Little Lord Fauntleroy didn’t say how far now, did he?”
Abrams returned a gesture that said “And the horse you rode in on.” Hart’s smiling Irish eyes rolled back with a resigned shake of his head. They then gave each other a knowing nod that spoke to three seasons of front-line experience that left them almost unscathed. Physically at least. The nod said we get the joke.
Hart checked his M1, Abrams his Thomson. The duo headed off on either side of the road leading east. Every so often, they glanced back to make sure no one was behind them. They were more concerned about that officer than any Germans who probably would just want to give up. What they wanted was to hear the rumble of tanks that would let them step into the narrow ditch bordering the road and wave goodbye to this assignment. Hart said he wouldn’t mind taking some more prisoners. Maybe he’d get a Luger. He had one back in Luxembourg, complete with holster and a belt with a buckle that read “Gott Mit Uns.” He lost it in a poker game he knew he shouldn’t have played because it was on a Sunday and he still retained an iota of parochial school guilt. His mother would have certainly disapproved. More importantly, he was lousy at poker, and the guys from the other unit promised they wouldn’t let him lose too much. Yeah, right.
Ah, but a Luger. Better than a medal. A Luger said you’d been here, counted coup, seen the elephant. A Luger had value. A Luger was status. There had to be one out there somewhere. What with all the Germans surrendering, and Austrians. The whole lot. One lousy Luger? Sure, there had to be one amongst the hundreds, no thousands, of prisoners. Hadn’t there been everything else that needed liberation? Nazi flags, daggers, patches, Iron Crosses for God’s sake. And cameras. Give an officer a Leica and you’d get a three-day pass. Dirty pictures, too. One fellow gave a limping officer, who was old enough to have fought in the last war, two packs of Lucky’s for a gold cigarette case. He seemed pleased with the trade. But as for Lugers? None.
They both looked down the road, which was empty and muddy, and expected to see nothing. They hoped to see nothing, but if they did see anything it would probably be more of those skinny arms high above unshaved faces bearing scared shitless smiles. Hart was thinking about dead bodies. They’d been told to rifle through them, in case they carried any useful intel. They never did. The dead were just regular soldiers nobody would ever have given a map to. Or Lugers for that matter. Lugers were officer guns.
Maybe they’d capture a grateful officer who’d give over his Luger grip first, his hand over the barrel, with an accented “I am your prisoner” followed by a crisp salute. A real salute, too, not a “Heil Hitler.” That would be one for the grandchildren.
“DOWN!”
Hart dropped into the muddy ditch, willing himself deeper into the ground. Abrams had crawled into a puddle ahead of him and kicked back at Hart’s head. He used hand signals to say there was a soldier, enemy soldier, with a rifle, to their left. Hart didn’t understand hand signals. “Just say it you idiot. Sonofabitch must have seen us.”
They peered over their ditch to see a hundred yards up a wooded hill a German, peeking out from behind a massive tree, his Mauser nervously pointing left and right. It was a grey uniform. He wasn’t a sniper. A sniper could have taken them out already. And thank god he wasn’t SS. He was alone, just one guy on a hill.
They kept an eye on him. He shifted around on that spot, crouching too little, pointing his gun all over the place, looking for Hart and Abrams lying low in their cover. Hart looked down the barrel of his rifle, adjusted the sights, but the German was partially blocked by the tree and he had lousy aim anyway even if better than Abrams’.
“Get help?” Abrams asked.
“Naw, just scare him off,” said Hart, who fired off a few rounds in the general direction of the tree. The German ducked behind it, fired a couple of rounds back, which kicked up dirt no less than 20 feet from where they hid. He was nervous and a bad shot to boot. They waited a few minutes, hoping the shots would bring up their unit. No one came.
Abrams pointed to the right of the hill and said he was going up and Hart should creep up on the left. “You shoot, covering fire. He’ll move to the right and I’ll get him. Stay the fuck down, right?”
Hart readily agreed to the ‘stay the fuck down’ concept. They started their ascent, Abrams creeping up on the right, Hart on the left keeping the German, still pointing all over the place, in doubt.
Hart had an easy crawl. It was April. The ground was soft, the leaves and debris moist, and he didn’t make a sound as he crept from the cover of a boulder to a stump to a tree, with the German in sight all the while. Abrams was more exposed. The German fired a few rounds down the hill at nothing in particular. The effort seemed half-hearted. Abrams thought maybe the German, too, was trying to scare them off. He wished the German would just walk away or give up. That he didn’t, that he wouldn’t, pissed him off, angering Abrams more than any fight he’d been in.
He crept closer, staying low, making no effort to surprise the German. That was Hart’s job. Abrams had the Thomson. When the Kraut bastard moved, Abrams was thinking of him as a Kraut now, he’d open up. He double-checked the safety and, lifted the Thomson. He was ready.
Hart was ready too. He’d moved closer. There weren’t 20 yards between him and the German. There he was, half his body behind the tree, the rest exposed, and the Kraut still scanning with his rifle left and right, up and down. There were a moment when Hart cracked a branch—the German must of heard —and he flattened himself waiting for a shot that never came. The German just kept moving his rifle around, pointing at nothing. He wasn’t very threatening. To Hart, he acted more confused, or maybe he didn’t really care. Or maybe he’d gone out hunting, like for deer, and didn’t expect to run into anyone, least of all Americans. Hart almost felt sorry for him; a hungry soldier looking for food in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There was no need to aim. Hart fired off some rounds, the German would move to the other side of the tree, and Abrams would let loose. From where he was, he could see Abrams looking back, and he gave him thumbs up. Hart rose from behind a tree and moved out to get off his shots. The German picked that moment to come out from his tree and face him. They stared at each other. Hart noticed a white flower on the German’s collar and in a split-second thought that any guy wearing a flower in his lapel would be a gentle guy, someone who’d didn’t want to fight, someone who’d want to surrender.
Or maybe it was more like a scene out of the Wild West. The German would sniff the flower, take his time, and come out firing.
Someone fired. A couple of shots followed and then nothing. The German was on the ground, still. Hart felt something in his side, but whatever it was wasn’t bad. He fired another round into the German and Abrams, who’d run up the hill, let go a brief volley into him as well. The body jerked under the unnecessary assault. Hart had got him with the first shot.
“You okay?” asked Abrams, pointing to Hart’s side with the barrel of the Thomson.
Hart looked down to see the stock of his M1 shattered from where the bullet had hit, blood trickling from the splinters that had entered his hip. He pulled the splinters out and smiled. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
They went over to the body and kicked it over. He was not a young man, not one of the kids they’d seen, but a guy, in his 40s, younger maybe. A pistol case dangled from the man’s belt. Abrams gestured with his chin. “Your Luger.”
Hart knelt to open the case. It didn’t hold a Luger. It held letters and a photograph. The picture was of a blonde woman, pretty, smiling, also kneeling. Her arms wrapped around two little girls, maybe three or four years old, not more than five. They had on exaggerated grins as if they’d been told “Give a big smile for Daddy.” The girls wore matching white dresses and had identical white hair ribbons, as well. Their hair glowed whiter than the mom’s if that was possible. Hart thought they looked like little angels. He crossed himself.
On the back was a name, Greti, in an adult’s handwriting and one other written in a child’s scrawl, maybe Hanna. And there was a doodle of a dog, with a smile, the sort of drawing a child would do to make her father smile on a trip away from home.
Neither Hart nor Abrams collected any souvenirs after that. Anyway, the war was over, pretty much, or soon would be.