Armageddon

Armageddon

by Leon Uris

Ich Bin Ein Berliner

—John F. Kennedy

Part 1

A Meeting at the Elbe

Chapter One

January, 1944

CAPTAIN SEAN O’SULLIVAN LIFTED the blackout curtain. A burst of dull light grayed the room. Christ, he thought, doesn’t the sun ever shine in London. He heard planes droning overhead toward the English Channel but he could not see them through the thick fog. He wondered if his brother, Tim, was flying today.

“Come to breakfast, dear,” Nan called.

Sean turned into the room. It was an elegant room, the most elegant he had ever known. The photograph on the mantle of Major G. Donald Milford stared down at him particularly harshly this morning.

The dining area was an alcove of three angled windows affording a view over Bayswater Road to Kensington Gardens. It was so mucky outside, the view had vanished. Nan Milford added to the opulence of the place in a silk and lace dressing gown. She put his jacket across the back of his chair and mentioned something or other about trying to remove a spot from the sleeve.

Sean sipped the coffee, grimaced, made a mental note to bum some decent coffee from the cook. This British version of ersatz was unfit for consumption in the first place and even worse when Nan got finished overboiling it.

Nan looked pleasantly tired from love-making. She was sad because she had made love so intensely and even sadder because she had fallen in love. She watched him with obvious adoration. “How is it that a handsome Irish brute like you never married?”

“And give up all this?”

“Do be serious for once, Sean.”

“The transposition of old country traditions to San Francisco, I guess.”

“And how many girls have chased you as I did and how have you avoided them?”

He was about to make a crack about playing it safe with married women but thought better of it. “A bachelor develops a sixth sense that tells him when his sanctity is about to be invaded. All sorts of built-in warning systems send up flares and rockets and bells go off.”

She tweaked the end of his nose. “Please,” she pleaded.

“Why be serious?”

Nan stiffened. She never got overtly angry ... only straightened her back, glared, conveyed hurt. “I am sorry I asked.”

From time to time Sean was suddenly reminded that Nan could be offended easily, that he had to treat her differently than other women he had known.

“It would be hard for you to comprehend,” he said apologetically.

“Am I so without understanding?”

“You’ve had certain advantages in your life that makes understanding impossible.”

“You speak as though I’m a terrible snob.”

“You are. But you are a real snob. It is nothing you deliberately cultivated. The world is loaded with people trying to be snobs who just can’t make the grade. A genuine, unvarnished snob is a creature to be revered.”

She liked to hear Sean talk his lovely gibberish. Of course no man had ever spoken to her that way before. Dear, sweet Donnie sat where Sean sat now. My! What a difference. Nan did not know if Donnie would be more offended by the fact that Sean was in his place or that Sean had the audacity to sit at his table with his sleeves rolled up and his collar unbuttoned.

“Are you trying to say that marriage would have held you from advancing your station?”

“Not at all, Nan. The reasons were more practical.”

“Now, I’m completely intrigued.”

“I haven’t married for the same reason my parents didn’t marry until after a ten-year courtship. He was just too damned poor to support a wife.”

He gulped another swallow of the horrible coffee. Nan’s soft hand on his lightened the blow. Her fingertips played over his hands. “Please don’t stop, Sean. We know so terribly little about each other.”

Sean’s large brown eyes searched the room and then outside into the mist, looking for nothing. “When my parents emigrated to America all they had was their hands, their backs and their hearts. My father worked harder than the Lord meant any man to work. I can hardly remember when he didn’t have two jobs ... longshoreman by day, watchman by night, cable-car driver by day, janitor by night, hod carrier, ditchdigger, bouncer. And Mom spent most of her life washing dishes and scrubbing floors in places like this. It makes me want to hurt you sometimes and all the other Mrs. G. Donald Milfords whose toilets were cleaned by my mother.”

She squeezed his hand tightly to let him know she understood.

“My father always said he didn’t come from the old country to raise three Irish cops for the San Francisco police force. His obsession was to put his sons through college. Work now, reward in heaven.”

“He must be a remarkable man.”

“Yes, he is,” Sean answered, “but one day his back gave out and his heart almost gave out too. It was up to mother to keep us alive. Up to me to get through college. I didn’t quit. I made it through. Know how? Picking up ten and twenty bucks fighting preliminaries in little clubs around the Bay Area. One of them in San Francisco was called the Bucket of Blood. I was a good boxer, Nan. I didn’t want to get hit in the face and have to explain the cuts and bruises to my mother. I fought under the name of Herskowitz, the Battling Yid. How’s that? So, the Lord was good. I got through Cal and I went to my mother one day and said, Mom, you don’t have to scrub Mrs. G. Donald Milford’s floors any more. I’ll take care of you.”

“Sean ... I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what? I’d made it and I was going to get my brothers through. We’re just a black Irish family which hangs together. One day I broke my hand in the ring and got this,” he said, pointing to the thin white-lined scar over his left eye, “and then my mother knew. From then on I became Schoolboy O’Sullivan the Fighting Prof. Mom nearly died every time I got into the ring.” Sean slumped. “So here we are, the brothers O’Sullivan. Tim’s up there flying and Liam is in a grave in North Africa. I wanted to get married, had a girl I loved, but my family came first and she wouldn’t wait.” He dumped an oversized spoon of mulberry marmalade over the muffin to smother the burned taste. “Nan. You’re one lousy cook.”

She muttered something about the impossibility of getting domestic help. The rest of the meal was in silence. Sean rolled down his sleeves, buttoned them, and fixed his tie and slipped into his jacket. The quiet became uneasy. Every time they said good-by now there was an averting of eyes. The feel of the wet cold clouds from outside had come into the room and engulfed them.

Nan knew that the God who ruled Sean O’Sullivan was pushing him to the end of their affair. “There are so many unsaid things,” she whispered.

“Our whole relationship is unsaid, Nan. That photograph of your husband who cannot protest. Your children in the country who remain hidden. The words we never say when we are making love. Six beautiful months of unsaid things.”

“They’re going to be said now, aren’t they, Sean?”

“Kind of looks like it.”

A jeep horn sounded from the street below. Beep, be, beep, beep. Nan reacted. “Must he blow that horn and announce your departures to the entire West End of London?”

Sean buttoned his jacket and put on his cap. At this moment she always turned genteel, holding her cheek up for the departing bus as she did for G. Donald Milford. Instead she found herself tight against him. He let her go and she reeled back and watched him disappear down the hall.

Sean hopped into the jeep alongside Second Lieutenant Dante Arosa, who gunned the vehicle away on the fog-wettened pavement.

“Scored last night,” Dante said with pride of conquest

“Little show girl?”

“A living testimony that English women are not cold in bed. Who in the hell libeled them in the first place? Some Irishman?”

Sean was indulgent. Dante was his own age, twenty-eight, but England was his first real experience with life. He had gone from a truck farm in the Napa Valley to the University of San Francisco to an almost too brilliant law career. There was little doubt of Dante Arosa’s ability as a counter-intelligence officer on duty, or his somewhat juvenile behavior off duty. Tall, thin young men shouldn’t smoke cigars, Sean thought. Dante doesn’t clamp the cigar in one side of his mouth solidly. It sort of hangs limply from the front of his teeth.

As they ran alongside Kensington Gardens the traffic thickened. Dante continued his testimony to British womanhood.

“By the way, don’t blow the horn.”

“Huh?”

“When you pick me up. One, park jeep. Two, emerge. Three, walk to door. Four, ring bell.”

Dante shrugged. He didn’t like Nan Milford. It was broads like her who gave the English women their bad reputations. Where does she get this Virgin Mary routine? She’s just another married broad shacking up behind her husband’s back no matter what kind of icing Sean puts on it.

They sank into quietness. Everything was different about London, these days. Everything but the weather. The long, harrowing nights in the bomb shelters were over. The tension had eased. The bombers were going in the other direction these days. There was an air of victory everywhere. People were looking toward the end of the war and it was evident in everyone’s voice and step.

“Sean.”

“Yes?”

“How far has this thing gone with you and Nan?”

“I wish I knew.”

“I’ll ring the bell.”

Dante Arosa cut the jeep abruptly in the middle of the block. Cars before him screeched to a halt and pedestrians scattered. He beelined for a spike fence that blocked a short, dead-end street named Queen Mother’s Gate. Dante hit the brakes, bringing the tormented vehicle to a halt before the terrified sentry. The sentry saluted half-heartedly and waved them through past the sign on the gatepost which read: MISSION, MILITARY GOVERNMENT, UNITED STATES ARMY.

The abbreviated, enclosed street held a half-dozen buildings set about a wide central courtyard. On one side were officers’ quarters, enlisted barracks, administration, dispensary, mess hall. Across the courtyard stood two large three-storied block-granite buildings housing the offices and conference rooms of SPECIAL MISSION, MILITARY GOVERNMENT.

From the instant they passed through the gate toward the motor pool the problems of life and love in London were done. Dante and Sean walked crisply in step toward the first of the Mission office buildings.

The directory in the anteroom read:

Room 101: Civil Administration of German Cities

Room 102: German Legal Codes

Room 103: Public Health

Room 104: Banking System

Room 105: Displaced Persons/Refugees

Conference Hall A/B/C: Identification of German Cities. Aerial Recon.

Room 106: Lab.

Room 201: Counter-Intelligence, Leading Nazis

Room 202: Counter-Intelligence, Secondary Nazis

Rooms 203/204/205: Eradication of Nazism

Room 206: Military Government Orders/Rulings/Manual

Conference Halls E/F: Identification of Nazis-Nazi Organizations

Third Floor: Document Center

Off the anteroom they entered the officer of the day’s office and signed in, were passed through the locked portal to the inner core of quiet bustle. A second security desk, manned by a sergeant, blocked the hallway.

“Morning,” Dante said, leaning over signing the register.

“Morning, sir.”

“Morning,” Sean said.

“Morning, Captain O’Sullivan. General Hansen wants you in his office at ten hundred. And frankly, sir... Eric the Red has the storm flag up.”

Chapter Two

BRIGADIER GENERAL ANDREW JACKSON Hansen balanced his specs on the end of his nose. He was short, hefty, had a few sprigs of gray hair so that the addition of a pillow under his jacket could have given him the appearance of kindly Kris Kringle. Other men wore glasses but he wore specs. His face was as mobile and expressive as a Punch and Judy puppet. This bubble of gentleness was deceptive for in an instant a stream of oaths could tell one why he was identified as Eric the Red.

He drummed his stubby fingers on the desk top and from time to time a particularly annoying word would growl from his throat as he read ...

CONFIDENTIAL REPORT: Requested for the eye’s only use of Brig. Gen. A. J. Hansen.

SUBJECT: Cohabitation; Nan Milford/Capt Sean O’Sullivan.

Mrs. Nan Milford. Age 35. Wife of G. Donald Milford, Major, British Army. Major Milford was captured during the German invasion of Crete in 1941. Has been a prisoner of war three years at Officer’s Lager 22; Westheim, Germany.

Before war Milford was a highly successful director of Morsby Ltd., one of Britain’s leading publishing houses. Member of board of directors of a dozen lesser companies. Rated moderately wealthy. Blue blood on both sides of family. Before the war the Milfords were considered congenially married. They associated themselves with London society, art, cultural and charity affairs. Members, Church of England.

Two children: Pamela, age 10. Roland, age 12. Children are living at home of paternal grandmother in Plimlington East where they were evacuated during the heavy bombing of London.

Since husband’s internment, Nan Milford has worked as a volunteer in the London Section of the International Red Cross, Prisoner of War Division.

Approximately seven months ago she met O’Sullivan who was then conducting a G-5 study on Prisoner of War Camps. In this connection he spent much time with her on official duty gathering specific Red Cross data.

O’Sullivan and Mrs. Milford have engaged in cohabitation for approx. six months. In the beginning they were extremely cautious about their rendezvous and kept away from outside social activities together. However secrecy appears diminishing. For the last two months cohabitation has occurred regularly in the fashionable Milford flat on Bayswater Road, London, W.2.

Single copy this report produced. Other records destroyed as requested.

Thos. Hanley, Major, Counter-Intelligence.

“Piss,” said Hansen as he slid the report into the top drawer of his desk.

He paced the room. He did not know if he were more angry with Sean or with himself. A. J. Hansen did not like to guess wrong about people. That annoyed him. He had selected Sean for the Special Mission over several hundred experts, all older, with more experience and sounder judgment.

Why did I pick him? There was that first creeping doubt of an error in sizing the man up. Why? Because he doesn’t back down from me ... maybe. Because any kid who loves his parents and brothers and takes care of them at the expense of his personal happiness would love his country that way too.

The general pouted some more back at his desk. Even when Sean lost his brother in North Africa he pulled himself together. Women! Goddamned women. These two have nothing in common outside the bedroom. She’s seven years older and they come from different social, economic, and religious worlds.

Hell, nothing wrong with a stray piece. But like the report said—cohabitate—and forget them.

Sean’s got to get rid of that woman.

The general’s orderly, a gangly acne-marked corporal from Kentucky, announced Sean’s arrival.

“Sit down, O’Sullivan.”

Hansen picked up a document Sean recognized as a study he had completed the day before. TOP SECRET, PREROGATIVES OF MILITARY GOVERNMENT COMMANDERS IN GERMANY.

“This report was two weeks late.”

“Lot more involved than I figured.”

“What? The report?” Hansen thumbed through the pages, playing for fifteen seconds of tension-building silence, “You’ve got a real rod on against the Germans.”

“If the General will be specific.”

“The General will be specific,” he aped. He adjusted his specs for reading. “This choice morsel is on page fourteen, paragraph sixty-two. I quote Captain Sean O’Sullivan. ‘In the event the orders of the local military commander are not carried out by the civilian population, the commander is empowered to seize hostages from the German civilian population and execute them at his discretion until his will is enforced.’ ” Hansen closed the report and snatched off his specs. “That’s a hell of a thing for an American boy to write.”

“I didn’t know our function is to spread Americanism in Germany.”

“Nor is it to continue Nazism. Now by hostages, Captain O’Sullivan, I take it you mean to define between Nazis and non-Nazis.”

“If the General will tell me if the bullet that killed my brother came from a Nazi rifle or a non-Nazi rifle.”

“So in judging all Germans as being the same, you mean to take hostages who are two, three, or four years old.”

Sean balked. “Well ... perhaps we should limit hostages to Nazis.”

“There are fifteen million Nazis in Germany,” Hansen pressed.

“We’ll have room for them when we open their concentration camps!”

“Sit down, lad, and don’t get your Irish up on me. I want the explanation of the hostage paragraph.”

Sean unclenched his fists and sunk into his seat once again. Eric the Red meant business. “In my following comment I said it would never be necessary to use hostages because the Germans are orderly people and will respond to whoever represents authority. You know damned well, General, I’ve said over and over they won’t conduct guerrilla resistance. Quote Churchill. The Germans are at your throat or your feet. They’ll be at our feet when we finish with them.”

“Then why did you find it necessary to put this hostage thing in?”

“Because they’ve got their own little special missions sitting in Berlin writing their version of the same manual. You know their versions? All Germans, get under American protection at all costs where kindly GI’s will supply you with cigarettes, chocolate, and short memories. We have to put that hostage rule into the record just to let them know it’s there.”

Hansen grunted. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk. His stubby fingers produced a bottle of rye whiskey and a pair of glasses. He poured two oversized drinks and shoved one of them to Sean. He knew again why he had picked O’Sullivan for the Special Mission.

“I lost a brother too. Mark Twain Hansen. First World War. Belleau Wood. We can’t go through this with those people again. They’re sick. They have to be healed. Becoming Nazis ourselves isn’t the way.”

“It always comes back to the same damned confusion,” General. What are we going to do with them?”

“Know the facts and believe in your country. You are here on this mission because our war begins when the shooting stops. Our bullets are ideas ... your folks are immigrants, aren’t they?”

Sean nodded.

“So are mine. My father, God rest his soul, came over by steerage after the Civil War and walked from New York to Iowa in the dead of winter.” The general took a swallow of whiskey and allowed himself the rare pleasure of a moment of nostalgia. “Black Hawk County, Iowa. We homesteaded a section of land. My father’s name was Hans Christian Hansen, after the Danish national hero. All of us were named after American heroes ... except my sister. She died from diphtheria in one of those damned Iowa winters. God almighty ... I’ll see my father to my dying day looking over the newly cut corn fields, standing there like a statue ... smoke coming from his pipe. He’d look at the leaves turning and put those two big leather hands on my shoulders and wouldn’t say much. At Thanksgiving he’d give a toast after he read the Bible and his eyes would fill with tears when he said ... God bless America.”

The tension between the men had passed. Sean thought of his own father and smiled. “My Dad would say, where else in the world could a shanty Irishman put three sons through the university?”

Andrew Jackson Hansen hit his hand on the desk. “That’s what I mean!” his gruff voice filled with enthusiasm. “We have to love America the way our parents did ... naive, sentimental, unsophisticated. The good Lord has been wonderful to our republic. He has given us the wisdom to fight wars with no thought of personal gain. But this time we cannot pack up and go home. We have come of age. We have inherited both the power and the responsibility of the world without seeking or wishing it But ...we must face up to it Our land has grown a magnificent liberty tree and its fruit is the richest ideal of the human soul. But, we cannot go on forever merely eating the fruit of the liberty tree or it will die. We must begin to plant some seeds.”

Damn Hansen, Sean thought. He could move you from anger to tears in a moment.

“My mother was a German immigrant, Sean. She saw a son fight her native country and die in the First World War. That killed her, too. I wouldn’t like the idea of my mother being shot as a hostage.”

Sean nodded that he understood. The long, hard, patient way would press them for a wisdom which they did not know if they possessed. He took the report from the desk. “I’ll do some rewriting.”

A. J. Hansen abruptly returned to the never-ending problems needing decisions on his desk, indicating without a word that the meeting was over.

Sean made for the door.

“By the way,” Hansen said, “do something about that woman.”

Chapter Three

THE TWO HUGE BUILDINGS on the right side of Queen Mother’s Gate were dark except for the light of two offices. A light in A. J. Hansen’s office was common. This light usually burned past midnight. No one really knew the number of hours A. J. Hansen worked, but he often remarked, “It’s a goddam good thing there isn’t a union to demand time and a half pay for generals or we’d bust the government’s ass in a year.”

He poured over the usual documents, appended the usual decisions, ate the usual sandwich, drank the usual glass of milk. Tonight it was the seizure of German banks, freezing assets, issuing occupation currency. Tomorrow? Maybe German railroads, maybe German textbooks. But once during each day the immediate problem became engulfed in the greater mission. All the reports were replete with highly worded ideals, but he wondered. Have we Americans lost the stuff? Are we too self-centered, too fat to understand and face up to what has happened to us? Sure, we will fight the war to its end. But what of it when the last shot is fired?

And these sick German people. Can we treat them with kindness? Will they understand it or mistake it for weakness? Indeed, can idealism be a practical solution to a people who have only understood force?

It came to that time of night when a shot of rye and a quick snooze was needed. He stretched out on the couch and covered his burning eyes. He thought of how he mentioned his father to young O’Sullivan today. Was it strange at all? With each passing day he was reaching back to his beginnings to find answers....

Andrew Jackson Hansen was second in line for the throne, the family farm, and as he put it, “didn’t give a lusty crap for farming.” He became the first of the Hansen family to strike out with his father’s reluctant blessings. He supported himself through the University of Iowa, in a classical way, waiting on tables, mopping halls. In the summer he lumberjacked some in Wisconsin and was a roustabout in the tent shows which pocked the Midwest after the turn of the century.

His first woman was a hootchy-kootchy dancer who took a fancy to him during the sophomore vacation. A. J. thought about her off and on for many years.

By World War I he had earned his degree and was teaching history, economics, and political science at River Ridge Military Academy in Michigan to upper-economic-strata boys who couldn’t have been less interested in history, economics, and political science. He joined the Army.

When his father died, a revered old man in that part of Iowa, the farm went to Tom Jefferson Hansen, who had always been cut out for that life. He ran it prosperously to this day with his sons.

The end of the war found A. J. Hansen at the rank of Captain and deeply involved in a program which sent food to starving Europe and later to Russia. He remained in the Army, cursing that his administrative and organizational ability kept him from ever receiving a fighting command.

In fact his only battles were with the Congress, Army brass, and a civilian public which largely considered the military as social lepers and fascists between wars.

Within the Army, Andrew Jackson Hansen had committed the initial sin of not being a graduate of West Point and therefore not a member of the West Point Protective Association. Secondly, in the regular Army it was standard practice to stud a male heir so that he might carry on the tradition of that Long Gray Line.

A. J. married a lovely woman from the Midwest who neither lushed nor shacked during his long tours of duty away from home and presented him with three daughters, none of whom turned out to be “army brats” and all of whom happily married nonmilitary men.

Despite his blatant disregard for tradition and an inability to keep his mouth closed at the discreet moment, Hansen’s genius in new programs and his unflinching acceptance of the role of whipping boy kept him at the right hand of the chiefs of staff.

In 1938 Colonel Hansen became an overnight sensation heading a committee to draw up the Army’s manpower needs. His report called for the immediate integration of Negro draftees and volunteers into all combat units.

A fellow officer from Georgia on the committee loyally reported this to some fellow generals from Virginia, Georgia, and Mississippi before Hansen was to go to Congress with the report.

“Andy. We aren’t going to stand by and let you push this nigger thing with the Congress,” a well-known artillery officer from Alabama warned as spokesman for the purity group. “Would you want a nigger officer leading your own son into combat?”

Hansen replied that it was a problem of semantics as he had no sons and he delivered the manpower report to Congress.

This not only infuriated the southern officer corps dedicated to the preservation of a white, Aryan army, but also the southern senators and congressmen who passed upon army promotions.

When the noise had simmered down Hansen found himself exiled to one of those remote posts where the Army punishes its mavericks and gives them time to reflect sins, pay penance.

His numerous requests for transfer to command a combat regiment went unanswered. By the time Pearl Harbor was attacked the powers-to-be figured Hansen had paid for his crime ... besides he was badly needed for a new program.

The program was G-5, Military Government.

In the beginning, G-5 trained lawyers at the University of Virginia. After the landings in North Africa if became apparent that military government law could not stop epidemics, do police work, counter-intelligence, mend broken roads and sewers.

Hansen searched both in and out of the Army for former mayors and city managers, for doctors, port and sanitation engineers, and bankers, newspapermen, linguists, and food experts and transportation and communications people, and made them officers.

At the Hore-Belisha Barracks at Shrivenham, England, he assembled two thousand experts with their British and French counterparts. Although they were older men, they worked as strenuously as paratroopers. They were assigned future German cities and towns in A, B, and C units according to size.

And in London at Queen Mother’s Gate fifty hand-picked men worked and lived under rigid security. These men broke down and studied every detail of the Nazi and German structure. Decisions came after laborious, detailed appraisal and went into the manuals often only after hot arguments.

Hansen stretched his squat body, blinked his eyes open, and returned at half pace to his desk.

How damned lucky, he thought, we have been able to fight our wars, pack up and go home. This was the true heart of the matter now. The military had been given the responsibility of G-5. Yet, American generals have never had to worry about combining a military victory with a political victory. Their minds could only think and plan the destruction of the enemy. Lord give me the strength to fight our own people as well as the Germans.

Chapter Four

SEAN WORKED FAR INTO the night, even after General Hansen had retired. He pondered on the revisions of PREROGATIVES OF MILITARY GOVERNMENT COMMANDERS IN GERMANY until they were within the framework of top policy. To hell with it, Sean thought. He’d ask Hansen to transfer him into a combat unit. But the general was even more alone than he, and battling greater forces. There was that instinct between men that told him Hansen needed him.

There would be little the German people would have to answer for beyond the misery they had created for themselves. Some reparations, some personal suffering, but nothing to compare with the tears and the blood they had caused. Already the damned lawyers had determined there was a difference between “criminal” Nazis and “noncriminal” Nazis.

Sean penciled through his passage on hostages and wrote instead: “When we enter Germany the purpose of Military Government is to expedite Allied victory. We will rule firmly but fairly, keeping in mind American tradition of not using brutality on the enemy civilian population. Military Commanders shall use armed force only in the event of resistance. Failure of the German population to carry out orders will be combated by imprisonment, fines or loss of food ration in extreme cases.”

Sean jerked the paper from the typewriter. “Gott bless the gutt kind Amerikan soldiers,” he cursed, ripped the paper up and threw it into the wastebasket He rubbed his temples. “Oh God, Liam, what shall I do?”

Did his brother cry out from the grave for revenge? Did Liam really want an answer for his death? Even when Liam had been bloodied by a bully and Sean and Tim sought to avenge him Liam said, let him go, don’t hurt him. Can’t you see, he attacked me because he was scared and confused?

Fight back, Tim said. Fight back, Liam. Too many people will drink your blood if they know you won’t fight back.

Liam said, revenge for the sake of revenge is immoral.

What do you remember most when it all fuses in blurs at two o’clock in the morning and when it all must be remembered in a few golden moments? Tim, Liam, Sean in the caves below Sutro Baths. The ocean pounding against the rocks. The water leaping up, trying to defy gravity. Liam O’Sullivan reading Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon to his two older, spellbound brothers....

“Oh, Liam. Your life was too good for them to take. Twenty-two-year-old boys shouldn’t die in lonely places called Kasserine Pass ...”

The omnipresent map of Germany hung over Sean’s head. He stared at it. took the torn paper from the wastebasket, and retyped it, and then he went on to the next section.

WEHRMACHT: GERMANY’S REGULAR ARMY.

Policy: The Wehrmacht has fought a conventional war against American forces. However, atrocities against civilian populations have been catalogued by counter-intelligence. Particular brutality has been evidenced against the Greeks, Slavic peoples and Jews. Military Government must determine to what extent the Nazis dominated the Wehrmacht. In those areas under Wehrmacht command where atrocities were committed we must hold the Wehrmacht commander responsible as a war criminal.

Dammit, Sean thought, I won’t back down. If the army commander were allowed to blame the Nazis for atrocities in his area, we would be digging legal traps for ourselves that would leave hundreds of crimes unanswered.

Yet Sean knew in his heart that no regular German Army general would ever have to answer in a court

Then who was guilty?

Before him were a half-dozen books, each as thick as a Manhattan phone directory. These were the “official” guilty, the Blacklist. This was the heart of the Nazi cancer. But wasn’t the whole German body infected? Sean had argued endlessly that Nazism was the historical and political expression of the entire German people.

He opened the index to the Blacklist to support his report ...

BOOK ONE: NAZI ORGANIZATION:

GROUP ONE: PARA MILITARY ORGANIZATIONS SERVING THE NAZIS: These groupings are not the conventional armed forces serving Germany (Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.) ALL OF THE BELOW LISTED ARE TO BE DISBANDED UPON OUR ENTRY INTO GERMANY AND THEIR RECORDS SEIZED.

SCHUTZSTAFFEL. Commonly known as SS. The SS is the prime target of Counter-Intelligence. We shall arrest ALL MEMBERS OF THE SS regardless of rank.

ALLGEMEINE SS. These are regional German SS charged with running SS schools, institutions and particularly “overseeing” the political machinery of specified political districts. These people are armed only with small arms. We shall arrest all.

WAFFEN SS. This is a fully militarized body with its own armor, supply and administrative forces. WAFFEN SS has special duties such as ghetto guards, concentration camp guards, slave labor camp guards, slave labor factory guards throughout the occupied countries. In addition, WAFFEN SS units have served in combat on all battlefronts. It is impossible to estimate the number of WAFFEN SS which will be in Germany at the time of our entry. This is the hard core of fanatics. We estimate they will be the center of any guerrilla resistance. Arrest all members immediately.

NAZI PARTY STORM TROOPERS (SA). Commonly known as the Brown Shirts. This is a para military group that was instrumental in Hitler’s rise to power and ultimate seizure of the government. The Brown Shirts used terror tactics in crushing political opposition to Hitler and brutality against minorities. The membership is 1,500,000. We shall arrest all persons rank of Sturmbannfuehrer or above (Nazis rank: Major). Book One lists 30,000 blacklisted for arrest.

Sean turned the page of the index. Where did it end ... where did it end ...

NAZI PARTY MOTOR TRANSPORT CORPS (NSKK). A pre-military training for Nazi Party members for future service in Waffen SS tank or motorized units. Despite the innocent sound of name it is Nazi drenched. Arrest all persons of rank of Staffelfuehrer or above. Book Four lists 10,000 blacklisted for arrest.

NAZI PARTY FLYING CORPS (NSFK). This group was formed in the early 1930’s to circumvent the Versailles Treaty forbidding a German air force. They formed under the guise of a civilian flying club but held secret military training and maneuvers, schools for glider pilots, flyers, aircraft construction and maintenance. Arrest all of rank of Sturmbannfuehrer and above. Book Five blacklists 5,000 for arrest.

Damn, damn, damn, Sean thought. If we knew so much about what they were doing ... why didn’t we stop them?

AUXILIARY HOME AIR DEFENSE CORPS (Heimat Flak or HF). Nominally Nazi but this group is under Nazi control and direction. These are mostly factory workers, however the organization does include several thousand Hitler Youth. Abolish without arrests.

PEOPLES ARMY (VOLKSSTURM). Consists of people too old or too young for regular military service. A “Home” Army constructed for defense of German soil/German cities. Age brackets 13–16 and 40–60. Although this group is under Nazi domination the soldiers will be treated as regular army prisoners of war.

GERMAN LABOR SERVICE (RAD). A compulsory labor force for all “Aryan” males and females. These people construct military fortifications, work in land reclamation and forest conservation, road buildings and the like. We are interested only in senior RAD officers and Book Six has 250 blacklisted for arrest.

TODT LABOR (OT). A group which absorbs unemployed for “public works.” This group built the Siegfried Line. Its functions overlap with above listed RAD. We have blacklisted 100 senior officers for arrest in Book Six.

HITLER YOUTH (HITLER JUNGEND OR HJ). A compulsory group for all “Aryan” males and females age 14–18. Young people are completely saturated with Nazi indoctrination. There are also nature study groups and agricultural studies, however we consider this among the most dangerous because they are young and in a formative stage. The officers and leaders are fanatical Nazis. Arrest all holding the rank of Sturmfuehrer (cadre leader). Blacklist Book Five lists 20,000 for arrest.

GROUP TWO: ORGANIZATIONS OF NAZI DOMINATED POLICE FORCES

ORDER POLICE (ORPO)

Sub 1 Schutzpolizei (Schupo). They police towns with 2,000 population or less.

Sub 2 Gendarmerie. Police open country in areas of 2,000 population or less.

Sub 3 National Fire Precaution Police.

Sub 4 Auxiliary Police. Volunteer citizens without pay used in general police work, traffic work, etc.

Sub 5 Technical Emergency Corps. Used in demolition, rescue, debris clearing. Particularly active since bombings.

Sub 6 Administrative Police. Records, payrolls, etc.

BARRACKS POLICE. DANGEROUS! A HEAVILY ARMED SHOCK TROOP KEPT AS A MOBILE RESERVE. WE CONSIDER THEM AS A POTENTIAL SOURCE OF RESISTANCE. IT SHOULD BE UNDERSTOOD THAT THE ENTIRE CIVILIAN POLICE MACHINERY IS UNDER COMPLETE CONTROL OF THE NAZIS AND IS A KNOWN LOYAL INSTRUMENT OF THE NAZIS. THEY ARE SEMI-MILITARIZED. THEIR LEADERSHIP IS NAZI. THE ENTIRE POLICE MACHINERY IS TO BE ABOLISHED AND ITS RECORDS SEIZED. THE ENTIRE GERMAN POLICE ESTABLISHMENT MUST BE REORGANIZED FROM THE GROUND UP. AFTER ALLIED VICTORY THIS IS CONSIDERED AN A1 A1 PROBLEM OF MILITARY GOVERNMENT.

GROUP THREE: NAZI POLICE MACHINERY, ITS HEAD OFFICE BEING THE REICHSICHERHEITSHAUPTAMT (RSHA), MAIN SECURITY OFFICE OF THE THIRD REICH.

SECURITY POLICE (SIPO)

Sub 1 THE SECRET STATE POLICE (GESTAPO). This is the notorious political police arm of the Nazi Party. It has unlimited powers of arrest. It is filled with the most fanatic of the Nazis. ALL MEMBERS ARE TO BE ARRESTED. SEIZURE OF GESTAPO RECORDS A1 A1 TARGET OF COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE. Book Six blacklists 15,000 for arrest.

Sub 2 CRIMINAL POLICE (KRIPO). An arm of the Gestapo working in the general crime field specializing in such things as black market, smuggling, etc.

Sub 3 SECURITY SERVICE OF THE SS (SD). The nerve center for spying on German citizens and using informers to collect information for the SS. NOTE: The SD has recently replaced the regular intelligence service of the regular German Army. ARREST ALL MEMBERS. Because of the ultra-secret nature of this group our lists are incomplete, but Book Six currently blacklists 15,000 for arrest.

Who were the guilty? How could this happen in but a single decade of Nazi control of the government without the unabashed support of the mass of the population? Where does it stop, Sean wondered ...

GROUP FOUR: NAZI POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS. THE FOLLOWING WILL BE ABOLISHED AND THEIR RECORDS SEIZED. THOSE BLACKLISTED FOR ARREST WILL BE FOUND IN BLACKLIST BOOK FOUR.

Central Office, NaziParty

Party Chancellory. All officers blacklisted.

Fuhrer’s Chancellory. All members blacklisted.

Organization of Germans Abroad. All officers blacklisted.

Center for Volksdeutsche.

Office of the National Union for German Elements Abroad.

Office of the Reich Organization Leader (arrest top 15 officers).

Office of the Reich Party Treasurer. All officers blacklisted.

Supreme Party Court/Subordinate Nazi Courts. All justices blacklisted.

Office of the Fuhrer’s Commissioner for Supervision of the Intellectual and Ideological Training and Education of the Nazi Party. All officers blacklisted.

Office of Reich Propaganda Leader. 300 blacklisted for arrest

Office of Reich Press Leader. Top officers blacklisted.

Office of Reich Press Party Chief. Decision on arrests, pending.

Reich Office, Agrarian Population.

Head Office, Public Health.

Office for Technology.

Office for Local Government

Office for Officials. All officers blacklisted.

Office for Commissioner for Racial Questions. All officers blacklisted.

Office for Genealogical Research. Decision on arrests, pending.

Foreign Office of the Nazi Party. All officers blacklisted.

Reichstag Party of the Nazis (Congress). Arrest all members.

Reich Woman’s Leadership. Officials blacklisted.

Office for Nazi War Victims.

Regional and Local Offices of the Nazi Party Administration.

Gauleitung in each Nazi Party Gau or Kreisgau (city or dist).

All Gauleiters (dist. leaders) blacklisted.

Kreisleitung of each Nazi Party Kreis (county). 700 Kreisleiters (county leaders) blacklisted.

Ortsgruppenleitung in each Nazi Party Ortsgruppe (branch, area of city). All leaders blacklisted.

Zellen and Block Officers (cells, blocks, neighborhood level).

All leaders blacklisted.

The Beauftragter der NSDAP (Nazi Party Commissioners Office). Specific blacklisted persons made.

And then, the rest of it. From the police and the political machinery the tentacles spread to every vein of German life.

GROUP FOUR: NAZI PROFESSIONAL AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS

Reich League of Doctors. Top leaders blacklisted.

Reich League of Technicians. Top leaders blacklisted.

Reich League of Teachers. Top leaders blacklisted.

Reich League for Officials.

Colonial League.

Women’s Organization (working women). Top leaders blacklisted.

League of Nurses.

Women’s Association (housewives).

Student Leadership Organization. Top leaders blacklisted.

Students League. Top leaders blacklisted.

Students Association.

Lecturers Association. Top leaders blacklisted.

Lawyers League in association with Notaries and Accountants. Top leaders blacklisted.

League of Former Students.

League of German Families.

German Labor Front.

Association for Physical Training.

Ex-Servicemen’s League.

Chamber of Culture.

Union of Local German Government.

German Hunters Association.

Council of Population Experts and Race Politics. Leaders blacklisted.

Committee for the Protection of German Blood. Leaders blacklisted.

Relief Organization for War Victims. (Seize records as we expect wholesale larceny.)

Winter Relief. (Seize records. Grand theft suspected.)

GROUP FIVE: CIVIL AND POLITICAL OFFICES UNDER DOMINATION OF THE NAZIS.

The below listed will be suspended and all officers dismissed. Those blacklisted for arrest will be found in Book Four.

Reich Ministries (National Offices) State Secretaries, Ministry Directors. 80 blacklisted.

Land Ministers, their State Secretaries (sub-division comparable to American state). 30 blacklisted.

District Presidents. 40 blacklisted.

Department Heads of Provinces. 30 blacklisted.

Commissioner General: Medical and Health Service. (See blacklist)

Commissioner for Shipping. Decision on arrests, pending.

Inspector-General: Water and Power. Decision pending.

Inspector-General: Transportation. Decision pending.

Inspector-General: German roads.

Reich Youth Leader. Arrests covered elsewhere.

Division Chief: Four Year Plan Office (records A1 CIC target).

Heads of Reichbank, Supreme Administrative Tribunal.

Hereditary Court

Labor Court

Archives.

Social Insurance.

Honor Court

Reich Food Estate Officials.

Regierungspresidenten (governors of provinces).

Landrate (district magistrates).

Oberburgermeisters (mayors) of German cities of more than 100,000 population. 95 blacklisted.

Officials; Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda/their regional offices.

Reich Ministry for Armament and War Production. 70 blacklisted.

Members of German Reichstag (Congress or Parliament). All members blacklisted.

Members of Supreme Court.

Members of Peoples Court.

Members of Special Court.

Members of Appeals Court.

Chief Public Prosecutors.

Arrest all.

University Rectors and Curators.

Labor Trustees. 40 blacklisted.

GROUP SIX: OCCUPIED COUNTRIES

Provisional Presidents. Reich Governors. 30 blacklisted.

Commissioner for Treatment of Enemy Property. Records are prime CIC target.

Head of Reichsstelle für Raumordnung (Dept. for foreign-area planning).

Chief of Military and Civil administration, occupied countries. 3,000 blacklisted for arrest.

GROUP SEVEN: MISC. CATEGORIES LISTED IN BOOK THREE

Police Presidents. 100 blacklisted.

Other key members police machinery. 320 blacklisted.

All members of the Nazi Party not accounted for otherwise holding rank of Beriechsleiter (group leader). 30,000 blacklisted for arrest.

Nazi Dozentenbund Officials (university lecturers).

Nazi Studentenbund (students bund). Nazi Kraftfahrer Corps Officials (motor pools).

Businessmen and others who have accepted Nazi honors

as Blut Orden (Blood Order)

or Ehrendolch (Honor Dagger)

or Ehrensold (Honor Pay).

Lists are very incomplete.

“Sean buddy, wake up!”

Sean’s head lay in the index book on his desk. Dante tugged at him. Sean’s head was full of annoying half dreams and pounding with overweariness. He lifted it, blew a breath. Dante Arosa came into focus. He smelled of whiskey and cigar smoke—and perfume from the show girl. “What the hell time is it?”

“Five A.M. You weren’t in the room so I figured you must have corked off.”

“Yeah ...must have dozed ...”

Dante helped him close the volumes, lock them in the safe.

“You’ve got the hard job,” Sean said. “All I have to do is give my opinion and watch it shoved down the drain. You’ve got to sit here and identify the pictures of these bastards. I was just about to explain why the Wehrmacht ... ”

“Get to bed You’re walking crooked.”

“Sometimes I sit here in the middle of all this puke and wonder what in the hell we’ve run into. Just one big goddamned daisy chain with eighty million players.”

Chapter Five

ONE OF THE THINGS Sean found so exciting about Nan Milford was her unalterable calm. He wondered if fire or flood could unnerve her. But now Nan showed visible signs of discomfort. “From the instant we met we have been working toward this moment,” she said.

“We didn’t invent adultery. It doesn’t bother some people. It bothers the hell out of us.”

“God, I’ve had a splitting headache all day.” She poured herself a cognac, felt it burn through her enough to soothe her leaping nerve ends.

Sean looked across the room at the omnipresent photograph of Major G. Donald Milford. “He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?”

“Donnie? Donnie is a lovely man. I shall tell you what kind of a man Donnie is. He would not only forgive me but he would understand.”

“It would be a lot easier if you were married to a rat. I’m a nice guy, too, Nan. You’ve gotten to me too deeply. We’re going to make a mess if we keep going.”

Nan forced herself to remain calm. Sean wouldn’t like a hysterical woman. What to say? How about me? I didn’t bargain for this, either. Donnie was comfortable. We were the same kind ... dull and comfortable. Can I say ... Sean, you make an animal out of me! I crave the things you do to me and make me do. They will never happen again to me ...

She spoke slowly and deliberately. “Donnie was gone for a year before he was taken prisoner in 1941. He was gone almost four years before I met you. That justifies nothing, of course. I would have gladly traded places with Donnie. Behind barbed wire he has no choice or conscience to fight. I think it is more difficult to be free and know you must voluntarily withdraw from the human race.”

It was hard to realize that Nan Milford didn’t have control of herself at every moment. Sean should have known. He should have known by the way she exploded, first in the darkness, and then here, in the dimmed lights of the living room.

“The children and I lived in the cellar every night for almost a year during the heavy bombing. I was finally forced to send them off to their grandmother. During the day I was that wonderful brave Mrs. Milford. A glorious example of stout British stuff. But when the bombs came at night I was alone ... alone in the gray world where you are not a person but a vegetable. It becomes so when you live in that gray world; for the want of feeling another human being you are jealous of every soldier and his girl in the street, even of the damned mating birds. Sean, you didn’t have a chance from the instant I met you.”

“Nor did I bargain for how I’d feel.”

“Nor did I. Should I be disgusted with myself because I’m not steeped in remorse or guilt? You know how you make me behave ... in there. I’ve never been that way before.”

Sean arose slowly and walked about the richly handsome room. Nan was neither nervous nor arrogant. She was just plain tired. “Sean, I am afraid of being alone again. You, me, Donnie ... I don’t know. I do know if you leave me I’ll have to have another man and God help me because I wouldn’t even care for him.”

“I guess we’re not supposed to be saints,” Sean said. “I’ve got to get going now. My brother Tim is down in London for the weekend.”

“Very well.”

Sean put on his topcoat slowly and walked to the door.

“Sean.”

“Yes?”

She was acid and angry. “You need not come back tonight. I shall be leaving in the morning to spend several days with the children.”

“Okay.”

“Will you be calling when I return?”

“Not if I can find the strength,” he said and he left.

The hall porter ushered him out into a billow of cold fog. He flicked his flashlight toward the pavement to find a path through the abysmal darkness. In a second the fog had swallowed him up.

“Sean!” a frantic voice pierced the black. “Sean ...”

He listened to directionless footsteps, leaned against a building trying to hide himself ... trying not to answer. “Sean!” her voice cried. “Sean!”

“I’m over here.”

Nan fell against him gasping for breath, wet and shivering and broken.

“You damned fool running outside without a coat ... you damned little fool.”

Nan trembled and cried. “Sean ... I know there must be a good-by ... but not now. I love you, Sean. I’ll pay any price for having you. I swear I shan’t care what shame or pain or risk will come from it. When you must go ... we will both find the courage, somehow.”

His coat was around her and he kissed her wet cheeks and pressed her into the strength of his arms. “I love you, Nan ...”

Chapter Six

SEAN CAME IN OUT of the fog at Henry Pringle’s Blue Hawk Inn. The Blue Hawk, named after Pringle’s World War I fighter squadron was the fighter pilots’ hangout. Henry Pringle himself was a mechanic and had yet to make his first flight. The pub was a shrine to the heroes he never ceased to worship.

The big room was cluttered with photographs of over two hundred British, American, Canadian, French, Polish, New Zealand, and Aussie aces and as many model airplanes hung from the black beams and rafters. The walls were studded with denuded bomb casings, squadron insignia, leather helmets, framed records of kills, machine guns and pistols, bits of wings and wheels. It was a whiskey and ale aviation museum.

Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury, an American correspondent gave Pringle’s Blue Hawk renewed prominence after a hibernation between wars. Bradbury reported the war from London long before Pearl Harbor. When the American volunteer Eagle Squadron flew with the RAF they discovered Pringle’s place. Bradbury wrote about it, and was held in reverence by the English only slightly less than the King. He built his shrine to the fighter pilots with words. One column each week was certain to be written from “Big Nellie’s” personal booth. The Blue Hawk was constantly mentioned in his deep-voiced broadcasts to America.

Despite Big Nellie’s bloated wartime salary he was almost always in hock. From the time the Eagle Squadron came to England he kept a special flat as a party place for weary flyers ... and picked up innumerable bar tabs for “his boys” ... floated uncountable loans—some never repaid because the pilots never returned from their missions.

Sean liked the rarefied atmosphere of the Blue Hawk. The flying talk, the unshaven chins, the crushed caps, the comradery; the nervous, bragging tension of men playing with death. It was far removed from the austere gloom of Queen Mother’s Gate.

Besides, Pringle had the best-looking barmaids in London, and fighter pilots were the glamour these days. Blue Hawk weddings were wild affairs—champagne corks went up like flak for three or four days.

There was too much information to be gotten around the place by a stranger. They were not permitted. Sean was no stranger; he sat down at Big Nellie’s booth. Nelson Goodfellow hunched like a grizzly bear over his typewriter, pecking out the end of his column over the din.

“Where’s Tim?”

“Out looking for poon. He said he’d see you here soon as he makes a connection.”

“What happened to the last broad?”

“Married a Canadian sergeant.”

Sean ordered a couple of drinks. “Tim owe you any dough?”

“A fin ... a tenner ... I don’t know.”

Sean paid his brother’s debt. The singers around the upright piano unloaded ...

Oh hallelujah, Oh hallelujah

Throw a nickel on the grass,

Save a fighter pilot’s ass,

Oh hallelujah, Oh hallelujah,

Throw a nickel on the grass,

And you’ll be saved ...

Big Nellie jerked his story from the machine. “You hear the combined voices of the Fourth Group ... Squadron Ten ...”

Big Nellie began to blue pencil through his story.

Got flak holes in my wing tips,

And my gas tanks got no gas,

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,

Got six Messerschmitts on my ass ...

Oh hallelujah ...

“They’ve got to sing loud,” Nellie’s gruff voice said. “They’re missing three tenors, two baritones, and a bass. Strafing a bridge yesterday, tree-up level. The Krauts were laying up there behind a cloud. It was a turkey shoot. How’s things at Queen Mother’s Gate?”

“Three casualties. One cut from a stray paper clip, another with dirty hands from carbons, and a third got lost in the fog walking from building A to building B and hit a wall.”

Nellie’s laugh matched his grizzly-bear appearance. “How do you get along with General Hansen?”

“Yesterday or today?”

“Let me tell you something about Hansen, Sean. Very few armies in the world have a dozen generals who are too valuable to be wasted on a fighting command. Yes ... I said wasted. He’s a Jeffersonian in uniform. I remember covering the manpower hearings before a joint committee of Congress. That little son of a bitch looked right at one of the senators from South Carolina and said, ‘We can never fight a just or correct war so long as some of our citizens must fight it as mess-hall boys and ditchdiggers. Our skins may be different color but the blood the Negro offers his country is the same color as yours.’ ”

“I’d of pulled out of there a long time ago, Nellie, if I I didn’t feel that. A lot of officers like to brag about their men following them to hell. Hansen’s the only one I’d care to make the trip with.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Sean. Hansen needs you.”

“That’s what I like about you, Nellie. You’ve always got information. I got here early on purpose so I could talk to you alone. What is Tim up to?”

Big Nellie’s wide puss faltered.

“Come on, Nellie. We’ve got twenty-five counter-intelligence men at Queen Mother’s Gate. Hansen uses them to spy on me. I use them to spy on Tim. There’s been some one-man missions out of his base.”

Nellie’s big paw engulfed the glass of whiskey. “German rocket bases.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“They are well hidden, they’re small, and can send up a snowstorm of flak. We’ve tried several ways to get at them. Right now we’re using Invaders and Marauders. They’re good birds but no hot rods. In elements of threes from medium altitude they’ve got a chance of getting in and out”

“Go on.”

“Our success has been limited. Tim talked his C.O. into letting him try a one-plane, low-level sneak attack. He got back from the mission all right. The plane looked like a sieve. But he demolished the target. So, your brother gets to take in another plane, solo next week.” He belted down the drink, signaled for refills. “When Tim flies low they tell me he likes to count the dandruff in the German scalps.”

Oh, there ain’t no fighter pilots down in hell,

Oh, the place is full of queers ... navigators ... bombardiers ...

Oh, there ain’t no fighter pilots down in hell.

Timothy O’Sullivan entered Pringle’s Blue Hawk with a big-busted redhead on his arm. Tim had a fetish for big-busted redheads.

Nellie and Sean watched him thread his way toward their booth amid the turning of heads, the bulging of eyes.

“Where in the hell does he find them?” Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury inquired with envy. “He’s only been in London for two hours.”

“Hell, look at him,” Sean said. Sean was prejudiced, of course. What woman wouldn’t go for a strapping, handsome, twenty-four-year-old black Irishman with a fast glib tongue and wild ways. Maybe it was all brotherly pride, Sean thought ... but then, Tim’s always had to fight the women off. He and Nellie arose as Tim and the big-busted redhead reached the booth and Tim mumbled a name like Cynthia or Penelope or something like that and she was pleased to meet them, particularly Nelson Goodfellow Bradbury, whom she knew by reputation, of course ... as who didn’t. They were seated, ordered drinks. Tim and Sean traded letters from home. A wordless exchange of glances told them they were worried about their father’s heart condition; he hadn’t come out of it since Liam’s death.

Sean said things were swell at Queen Mother’s Gate; Tim said they were swell at Braintree; Henry Pringle paid his personal respects; they drank some more.

Tim was spotted and called to the piano, where the big-busted redhead delighted the flyers of Squadron Ten by standing next to him and wiggling in time to the music. Tim’s entrance on the scene dictated a round of Irish ballads. A third and fourth round of drinks led directly to a seizure of nostalgia and Tim sang his father’s very favorite in a handsome, rich Irish tenor ...

Kathleen Mavourneen! the gray dawn is breaking. The horn of the hunter is heard on the hill ...

“The son of a bitch can do everything,” Big Nellie said. “He’ll be a cinch if he runs for Congress ...”

The lark from her light wing the bright dew is shaking ...

Kathleen Mavourneen! What, slumbering still?

After the fighter pilots of Squadron Ten had been moved to tears, the redhead excused herself to tidy up and Tim returned to the booth.

“Well done, lad. You’re in fine voice tonight,”

“Nellie. I’m in a bind. I need a room.”

Bradbury shrugged. “There’s an all-night party going on at the flat.”

“So, take her to a hotel,” Sean said.

“She’s got a mental block about hotels.”

“Here. Take the key to my place. I’ll take a hotel room.”

“Wouldn’t think of it, Nellie.”

“Sure you would,” Nellie answered. “Besides I’m pushing off early. I’ll be flying on a special mission tomorrow.” He looked Tim squarely in the eyes as he handed him the key. “I’m going to ride an Invader. They’re taking a crack at a V-1 base.”

Tim took the key, avoiding both the other men’s eyes. “Should be interesting,” he said.

The correspondent rose to his full reaches of six feet six inches and lumbered across the room. His journey was punctuated by handshakes, back-slaps, and hi-Nellies.

The brothers were alone. “What’s the matter, Sean? You look real down.”

“We’ve got all weekend to talk about it.”

“Christ, I’m sorry. I’ve got to get back up to Braintree first thing in the morning. Let me put whozits in a taxi and send her home. We can hole up at Nellie’s and talk.”

“The gesture is out of character. I’ll slip into Nellie’s place later and sleep on the living-room couch. Well have a chance to talk in the morning.”

Tim began to protest, but the big-busted redhead returned and her mere presence swayed the argument Sean’s way. Tim and the girl left the Blue Hawk after “regretting” Sean could not join them.

Chapter Seven

“WAKE UP, SWEETHEART.”

Sean blinked his eyes open. Tim, dressed and shaven, stood over him. He looked around. He was in Big Nellie’s flat. He came to a sitting position cautiously. His head throbbed. His mouth held a foul taste. The smell from the kitchen of breakfast cooking added to his discomfort.

“One thing I can’t stand,” Tim said, “and that’s a drunken Irishman.”

“Where’s the broad?”

“Just put her in a taxi. We never heard you come in. What time was it, anyhow?”

“Hell, I don’t know. We closed the Blue Hawk and hit a private party. Pringle poured me here.”

Sean wove to his feet and threaded an unsteady course to the bathroom, threw up, then dunked his head in a basin of icy water. He spread a line of toothpaste along his forefinger and pushed it over his teeth, fished through the cabinet for a brush and comb. The mirror revealed a stubble-chinned, bleary-eyed man in the throes of a monumental hangover.

He went to the kitchen, where Tim labored over the stove. Sean opened the refrigerator and mumbled about no fruit juice, but there was beer. He uncapped one. Thank God Nellie still keeps his beer cold. He flopped into a chair and asked what time it was.

“Six-thirty. I’ll get the eight o’clock train from Waterloo.” Tim shoved a plate of ham and eggs before Sean. He balked.

“How’s the redhead?”

“Cynthia? Good lay. Besides, she is a nice kid. Lost her husband in Greece. Got a seven-year-old boy. You ought to give her a call one of these days ... if Nan ever gives you a night off. ... Listen, big brother,” Tim pursued, “you’re not the binge-throwing type. What’s bothering you? Nan?”

“Partly.”

“Trouble with you, Sean, you’ve always got to fall in love. You’ve got to make a big affair out of it. Christ, can’t you take these women with a grain of salt?” Tim chewed a bite of ham, then waved his fork under Sean’s nose. “You’re going to get yourself in a real sling with this Milford broad.”

‘Tim ... I love her. I love her more deeply than I loved that other girl. I’ve never felt like this about anyone.”

Tim dropped the fork and sighed. “You poor bastard.”

“I said I love her.”

“Sure, I can picture it now. You, me, Nan and Dad out at Seal’s Stadium drinking beer and watching the ball game on Sunday afternoon.”

“Smart ass ... smart ass.”

“She’s not one of ours and we’re not one of hers.”

“Who in the hell says we’re talking marriage.”

“So, what are you talking about, Sean?”

Sean shoved the plate away, snatched the beer bottle, and sulked from the table. He leaned against the wall ... glowering, sulking, sipping. Tim’s hand touched his shoulder.

“I’m on your side, Sean. A woman like Nan’s got more class than you and I will see in the rest of our lives. I guess she must be pretty easy to fall in love with. But I come down from Braintree every week and see you eating your heart out. You can’t get to needing a woman that much knowing you’re going to have to give her up.”

“You’re right, of course, but it’s not that easy to kiss her off. I don’t know if I could stand to be in the same city with her and not call her. I keep telling myself to transfer out ... but ... you know how I feel about General Hansen. He’s fighting the whole goddamned Army and State Department. I can’t quit him, either.”

“Well ... you might as well eat your breakfast.”

They both picked at their food listlessly. Sean gave up trying to eat. “Nan Milford isn’t all that’s bothering me. Tim O’Sullivan is bothering me too. I hear you’re turning into a real hot pilot.”

“Big Nellie talks too much.”

“He just confirmed what I already know. You were shipped out of your fighter squadron for your own good. You were put into Invaders to slow you down because you were too reckless. Now, you’ve figured how to win the war single-handed.”

“What the hell do you want from me!”

“Stop carrying the flag, Tim. You’re always carrying the flag. When you were ten years old you wanted to join the Irish Republican Army. Erin go bragh! Up the Republic! At ten! And if I hadn’t stopped you you’d of quit college and joined the Lincoln Brigade in Spain.”

“At which time,” Tim interrupted, “my brother the fighter dramatically held up his hands and said, ‘I took two fights to pay your tuition and broke my hand. I’ll break the other one to keep you in school.’ ”

“So maybe I was wrong? Maybe I did something bad?”

Tim became quiet He shook his head. “You’re never wrong, Sean. You never let me get into trouble ... never let me get hurt.”

“What is this obsession? What makes you so angry ... hell, when we were kids and we used to climb down to the caves at Sutro ... Liam ... Liam would talk about the Irish poets and you would talk about the Irish terrorists.”

“How in the hell can you remain so impersonal to a war that’s taken our brother!”

“Don’t you think I’ve cried for Liam?”

“You sit there day after day, week after week in those rooms at Queen Mother’s Gate. You know what the Germans have done! Don’t you ever feel like you’re going to break apart for the wanting to get back at them!”

Sean shook his head with a measure of guilt. “I suppose my judgment is a job qualification. I can’t let personal emotions get mixed up in it.”

“That’s it then,” Tim said, “your war is careful. Mine is another kind. And neither of us is wrong.” Tim grabbed his brother’s arm excitedly. “When I was a fighter pilot and we were coming over German land I almost always saw Liam’s face outside the window. I would see him smiling softly the way only he could ... I would hear him reading to us in the caves. And then ... I would visualize Liam’s grave. I want to tell you, Sean. I begged for strafing missions. I liked to watch Germans scatter and cower in ditches. I wanted to fly so low I could chop them up with my propellers.” Tim’s eyes became watery. His voice softened. “Private Liam O’Sullivan ... age twenty-two. Major in literature. Liam was a poet. Poets shouldn’t die. You and I would have done all right by Mom and Pop ... but Liam ... he could have brought us honor. Oh God! Why does the wrong brother have to die?”

Tim began to weep. He always cried when he spoke about Liam.

“Liam said revenge for revenge’s sake is immoral. Call it off,” Sean pleaded. “Fifty-four missions is enough. You’ve shot down ten enemy planes and destroyed a rocket base. Tim ... we’re winning this war, now. We’ll be landing in Europe in a few months. You’ve got to start being careful.”

Tim bolted from his chair. “Shut up. You’re starting to disgust me!”

Sean grabbed his brother and shook him. “Goddamn you, Tim! Goddamn you! Don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself! You want to put Momma and Poppa in the grave beside you!”

“Don’t ask me to fight your war. I am what I am.”

Sean’s hands dropped to his sides helplessly. “I’ll get myself squared away and ride down to the station with you.”

Chapter Eight

A. J. HANSEN SAW in Sean O’Sullivan the image of himself, a defiant young officer before a superior, demanding a combat command.

“So,” snorted Eric the Red, “you want a transfer. You got nut aches to be a hero. Congratulations. That’s just what this Army needs, one more infantry company commander.”

“I’m not cutting it here, General.”

“That’s damned well for the General to decide.”

“You’ve got my report all doctored up to conform with policy and high-sounding ideals, but there were just too many things I was forced to write that rubbed against my grain.”

He even sounds like me, Hansen thought. How many times have I justified my existence as a desk jockey? How many nights have I gone to sleep making myself believe that I was in the most important service I could render? How many lies have I told myself after my ass has been burned?

Just today, Hansen thought ... just today.

There had been another frustrating experience at Supreme Headquarters as Hansen pleaded with American political commanders to listen to British advice. The invasion of Europe was at hand. Hansen begged them to plan battle tactics ahead within a framework of post-war political settlement. But all those mummies could think of was how to crush the enemy, how many rolls of toilet paper to land in France, how quickly they could all get home and forget the whole ugly mess.

A. J. Hansen had kept an almost singular watch on the Russians for years. He watched the Russians snatch up eastern Europe without protest, and watched Russia spread its tentacles into American and British spheres in Greece and Italy and into the French Underground. Hansen knew his Russians from firsthand dealings. But his arguments hit a dead end.

And now, there stood before him a young man unable to reconcile himself to eating similar crow.

“It takes a rare kind of man to serve his country without the benefit of pyrotechnics or reward and a different kind of courage to keep your mouth shut and go on working and believing when you are positive those around you are wrong. We don’t have enough men of this kind of dedication, Sean ...”

“That’s only part of it, sir. I’ve tried to stick because I know what you’re up against.”

“Then what is it, man?”

“Maybe I long to have a piece of this war like my brother has. I have wished many times I could be as devout as you. But, this work here has never given me that sort of fulfillment.”

“And maybe you’re looking for an easy way to end it with that woman. Sure ... get yourself transferred. Let the Army settle the affair for you.”

“That might be part of it too.”

Hansen stood and turned his back to Sean, stared through the window from his third-floor office down into the vast courtyard of Queen Mother’s Gate. “The General requests,” he said, “that the Captain remain in this command.”

Hansen nearly choked on his humiliation. He could go no further now. He could not put into words the needing of Sean’s keen mind, the respect of foolhardy pride, or put into words admiration for the kind of loyalty Sean had given him. Nor could he get into that part of it about having three daughters and no sons. From the first bombastic clash almost two years ago there had been that strange sort of devotion that men find for each other in times of war.

“I’ll give you your piece of this war,” Hansen said. “It will mean staying here at Queen Mother’s Gate, losing more arguments to stupid bastards, eating crow. It will mean that seeing or not seeing that woman remains within your resolve.”

Sean did not answer.

“This mission will set up a Pilot G-5 Team to study a German city. This city will be learned so that every street, every citizen, every function is known. We will build a scale model in one of the conference rooms ... fly aerial recon flights over it, know more about it than we have ever known about any piece of territory in Germany. This pilot team will have to have an answer for any possible question ... sewage ... Nazis ... displaced persons ... whorehouses. This is the textbook town from which we will gain insight to learn how to govern Germany. When the invasion comes the pilot team will move into Germany and continue on from theory to actual practice. We will test new laws, ideas there first ...”

The pilot team for Germany! This was more than the piece of the war he had reckoned on. Sean knew that on an impulse General Hansen had taken another gamble with him. Such a command should go to someone with solid experience in government ... someone not so stubborn.

“I could let you down very badly, sir.”

“I don’t see it that way. Do you know anything about Rombaden?”

Sean’s face narrowed in thought. “In Schwaben Province. Landkreis of Romstein. Sits on a big bend on the Landau midway between the Black Forest and Munich. One of the most fanatical Nazi strongholds.”

“That’s a good start,” Hansen said. “There’s a report up at Document Center by a professor in Germanic studies. He was born and raised in Rombaden, was an inmate of Schwabenwald Concentration Camp in ’35 and ’36. Came to America after his release. Start reading it.”

Sean was too caught up in the sudden challenge to weigh the enormity of the task.

“You’ll want Dante Arosa for your counter-intelligence, no doubt. The two of you go to Shrivenham and pick your team. Rombaden has an A1 rating. Take anyone you want. Any questions?”

“Why Rombaden? Why not Regensburg or Essen or Hanover?”

Hansen adjusted his specs and began to read the papers on his desk. “I have a peculiar affinity for the place. My mother came from there.”

Sean got up to leave. “Funny damned war,” he said.

“O’Sullivan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“One more thing.” Hansen opened the top drawer, palmed a pair of gold oak leaves, and threw them on the desk. “I wore these very same ones, years ago. Maybe they’ll bring you better luck. Stick them on your shoulder ... we don’t want any of your Englishmen to outrank you, Major. ”

Chapter Nine

CONFIDENTIAL

PRELIMINARY STUDY FOR MILITARY GOVERNMENT

CITY OF ROMBADEN/LANDKREIS OF ROMSTEIN, GERMANY

LOCATION:

Southern Germany. State of Württemberg. Province of Schwaben. Landkreis (County or District) of Romstein. The City of Rombaden is built along the north bank of the Landau River 100 miles west of Munich; 60 miles east of the Black Forest; 30 miles due north of the Swiss/German border at Lake Constance. The Landkreis (County) of Romstein contains the City of Rombaden and continues on the south bank of the Landau into rolling foothills and farmlands. Both the city and district are surrounded by typical German forests covering 30% (about national average) of the land. Most famous is the Schwabenwald Forest.

GENERAL BACKGROUND:

First settled by Celtic Tribes two thousand years B.C. One must approach the history of this area in a context of /and as a segment of German history. For 3500 years there was no Germany, per se. There were Germanic Tribes, States, Princedoms, Kingdoms, Duchies, Landkreise all ruled by a local rank of royalty or nobility. At one time in German history there were 350 separate self-governing royal entities.

Germany, therefore, has been a collection of royal alliances heavily influenced and dominated by church alliances. Germanic tribes have sat between the Slavic world on the east and the Roman world on the west and south.

From time to time certain Germanic areas dominated the others. Prussia and Austria stand out, and personalities such as Charlemagne and Frederick the Great emerged. Nevertheless Germany did not become a united nation until Bismarck published his Elms Dispatch in 1870, a mere 70 years ago. Germany was the last land in Europe to become a nation, the last to colonize, one of the last to industrialize and the last to overcome the ravaging ruination of the Thirty Years War (1614–48).

German history has been a long bloody series of wars interlaced with power plays of royal and religious alliances inside her borders and of pressure outside her borders.

The Rombaden/Romstein District, for example, has been invaded by the Teutons, Romans, Goths, Huns, Vandals, Bavarians, Franks, Burgundians, Saxons, Bohemians, Prussians ... among others. The Rombaden/Romstein District has sent armies into the field against the Danes, Swedes, Mongols, Magyars, Wends, Turks, French, and Italians ... among others.

A common error is to lump all Germans together as similar persons. Germans are as different in background and behavior as is a Bostonian from a Texan—an Iowan from a New Yorker.

The Province of Schwaben, wherein Rombaden/Romstein lies, has a fiercely proud tribal-like closeness. From Schwaben emerged the branches of the Hohenzollern and Hohenstauffen families that have dominated the German royal line. The Schwaben League and Schwaben Princes have been mutinous, engineered many revolts, and have been in the balance of power plays throughout their history.

Rombaden/Romstein has always identified itself with the Catholic side of the religious struggle. The area had nearly always been in the Holy Roman Empire until it was dissolved after the Napoleonic Wars. It might be noted here that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, Roman or an Empire, but a constantly shifting alliance of Germanic Kingdoms, Princedoms and Duchies with the Papal powers.

Rombaden/Romstein has been ruled or dominated by the Von Romstein Family. They are minor Schwaben nobility of the Hohenstauffen Line. The head of the family has usually held the rank of Markgraf or Graf (Count).

Rombaden City has been totally or partially destroyed at least a dozen times. War has ruined it ten of those times. Rombaden was destroyed twice during the Thirty Years War. It was so badly mutilated that the city never fully recovered from it for hundreds of years (nor did all of Germany for that matter). Rombaden was destroyed twice again during the Peasants’ Uprisings, which were particularly bloody in Schwaben.

Rombaden was destroyed during the Napoleonic Wars.

Rombaden was destroyed twice during the series of wars between Prussia and Austria.

Rombaden was destroyed twice by fire.

Rombaden has been partly or almost completely depopulated by plagues a half-dozen times during the Middle Ages.

We must bear in mind that the story of Rombaden is not alien to the story of most German cities and that very few American cities like Atlanta, have ever been ravaged by war.

In addition Rombaden/Romstein has been traded, sold or bartered to consolidate royal marriages, peace treaties, etc., a dozen times.

A detailed history shows that this district has been in over 600 different alliances.

A never ending series of disasters has marked German history. Rombaden has rebuilt itself after each catastrophe with typical German energy.

GENERAL DATA:

ROMBADEN (Roman Baths) Population 90,000. With Romstein District, 150,000. 85% Roman Catholic. The city was named for the Roman bath antiquities found in the thermal springs in the environs. It is distinctly Schwaben in its tradition, singsong dialect, dress, etc. A great provincial pride exists. However, there are unmistakable influences of nearby Bavaria, particularly in Rombaden’s architecture.

Rombaden stretches along the northern bank of the Landau. Two bridges cross into the Romstein District on the south bank. Between these two bridges is an enormous Rathaus Platz (City Hall Square) which is about a half mile in length.

The square is surrounded by dominating buildings. On the east side is Marienkirche (Mary’s Church) of cathedral proportions. The single onion-dome tower is only slightly shorter than Munich’s Marienkirche. The baroque interior is considered the most magnificent example of the period in all of Germany. The church was rebuilt in 1670. On the west end of the square opposite the cathedral is the Rathaus (City Hall), a square Renaissance-type structure from the seventeenth century. Under the Rathaus is the Ratskeller (City Hall Cellar or Restaurant), which is a customary meeting place in German towns. This particular Ratskeller was the scene of early-day Nazi rallies. The half-mile long northern boundary of the square is lined with a series of buildings: the Rombaden Medical College and Research Institute and Hospital; the Roman Kunsthalle (museum); the famous puppet theater and the Opera House. The museum, incidentally, holds innumerable treasures of German masterpieces ranging from Dürer to the modernist Paul Klee.

There are three statues on the square. The statue of the Virgin Mary stands before the cathedral. Before the Opera House is the second statue—Hinterseer, the poet, and Rombaden’s most famous son. It was he who wrote the Legend of Rombaden. The third statue stands before the City Hall, depicting two characters from the Legend of Rombaden, the mythical god Berwin and the goddess Helga.

This mammoth square, capable of holding most of Rombaden’s population, was the scene of much Nazi pageantry.

The central business district fans out behind the northern edge of the square.

The industrial section is along the river bank. There is the big Romstein Machine Works owned by the ruling family. It is actually a complex of a half-dozen factories and is the economic backbone of the area. Since the Hitler era it has been engaged in arms manufacture and aircraft motors. Much of the factory has been moved underground since the war. It is believed to be manufacturing V-2 rocket parts. It is believed, further, that almost all of the labor consists of slaves imported from occupied lands.

There are other factories, mostly of a light-industry nature, on the river front: A brewery, a small barge-construction yard and a leather works. There are a number of the generation to generation shops in crystal cutting, the manufacture of the famous Rombaden puppets, a toy factory, etc.

Rombaden is known for its gay life. A large source of the town’s income comes from the fact that it has been an overnight stopping place for Landau river-barge pilots. To facilitate their entertainment there is a three-block-long street of beer halls, bars, small hotels and brothels known as Princess Allee, which has a reputation of being a “little Hamburg Reeperbahn.”

The pre-lenten ball of the Medical College Students is a riotous affair drawing artists from all over Schwaben and Bavaria for a week of unabashed revelry. No less bombastic is the November Beer Fest in which the city Hall Square is covered by several enormous tents. A half-million liters of beer are consumed along with staggering amounts of wine, schnaps, and Schweinwürstchen.

To counterbalance these various orgies there is a splendid opera and symphony season, puppet theater, innumerable scientific seminars at the Institute and other cultural affairs.

Rombaden has its own unique pageant based on the Legend of Rombaden, which is a thousand years old. In medieval costume there is a re-enactment of the story of the legend. The climax is the reading, by a dozen actors, of Hinterseer’s epic poem. This takes place before his statue, for upwards of a hundred thousand listeners.

ROMSTEIN DISTRICT (Roman Stone)

Upon crossing the two bridges you enter the District. It is dominated by the Von Romstein family, the Von Romstein estates and the Von Romstein castle. The area has been under such domination for eight centuries.

The family’s personal estate covers nearly 100 square miles and includes its own private forest for hunting.

There are three main farming villages named after leading Von Romsteins; Ludwigsdorf, Sigmundsdorf and Ottosdorf.

The castle is an exquisite structure of seventy rooms and holds an untold wealth in art treasures. It sits back six miles from the river on the first of the rolling hills in the proximity of Ludwigsdorf.

Ludwigsdorf is also the entrance village to the Schwabenwald Forest, which has gained notoriety as the site of the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp. It was one of the first political prisons opened by the Nazis in 1934. The entire forest area is controlled by fanatical Waffen SS. (At the time the writer of this report was an inmate, 1936–37, there were some 6000 political prisoners, several priests and pastors included. The most famous inmate at the time was the old Social Democrat, Ulrich Falkenstein. It is not known if he is still alive.)

Also on the south bank of the river, somewhat removed from Rombaden, are some forty or fifty medium to large estates belonging to the wealthy and upper crust of the area. In this area are also a dozen hotels built around the natural hot springs. The Germans are ritualistic in their belief of the great curative powers of the spas. The center of this upper-class activity on the south bank is the Kurhaus, a gambling casino and rather muted version of the bawdy Princess Allee across the river.

Rombaden/Romstein has many “typical” German characteristics.

There is idol worship, tribalism, revelry and mysticism.

There is the pagan ritual of the Nazis.

As a contradiction there is strong Catholicism, a cultural and educational life and a modern industrial complex.

This tug of war, this paradox, runs deeply in the German character. It is particularly easy to see in Rombaden/Romstein. Rombaden, indeed, is representative of the eternal German, who is looking for himself and is an enigma to himself as well as to the outside world.

CURRENT POLITICAL DATA:

The Von Romstein family dynasty has been the absolute power for eight centuries. The current family head, Graf Ludwig Von Romstein, ascended to the hierarchy after a distinguished flying career in World War I. He is an intimate of Hermann Goering. The middle brother, Baron Sigmund Von Romstein, has been Oberburgermeister (Mayor) of Rombaden for nearly two decades. Count Ludwig himself is the Chancellor of the District so between the two of them they control the political apparatus. A younger brother, Kurt Von Romstein, is the Nazi Gauleiter (District Leader) but it is not certain that the older two are actual Nazis.

Graf Ludwig Von Romstein, like many Germans, was bitter and disillusioned by the Versailles Treaty. His “class” had little faith in the strength of the Weimar Republic. His district, like most of Germany, was not self-sustaining in food and had to manufacture to live. The depression, inflation, lack of food and restrictions of the Versailles Treaty wreaked havoc in the district and gave rise to a strong Communist Party.

Graf Ludwig Von Romstein gambled with the Nazis. The younger brother, Kurt, was made an active Nazi. We are certain that it was at the Count’s insistence as “family” duty.

With Hitler’s ascent and the rearmament, the Romstein Machine Works was one of the first to profit by huge contracts. New economic prosperity, laid directly to the Count nuzzling the Nazis, and with the Count’s own brother as Nazi Gauleiter, the Rombaden/Romstein area turned into a fanatical Nazi stronghold equal in fervor to Munich, Nuremberg and the Eastern German States.

Since World War II the Machine Works as well as the smaller factories have been converted to making war material. The area has been heavily bombed in recent months.

Sean’s doubts deepened as he dug more deeply into the tormented history of civil and religious wars, of blood orgies, of paganism and tribalism. Of the pride of barons and princes. Of a story of double dealings, alliances, back stabbings too complex to follow. Of the homosexuality and perversion of the Nazis. Of a deep-set brutality never known by man before. Of Hinterseer, the mystic poet. Of the mystic philosophers. Of singers and musicians and writers and men of science. Intellectuals and barbarians. Brutes and scholars. Love and murder.

Sean O’Sullivan wondered, as General Hansen wondered, if any manner of man could bring sanity to a land that had never known it. What power, earthly or otherwise, could make the wonderment of an idea find its way through this lacework of muck and beauty?

Chapter Ten

FOR THE NEXT MONTH Sean and Dante Arosa plunged into the records and backgrounds of nearly four thousand officers at the Military Government Training Center at the Hore-Belisha Barracks at Shrivenham. They weeded, weighed and then were ready to select the Pilot Team.

Dante Arosa returned to Queen Mother’s Gate to assemble all the intelligence data on Rombaden while Sean stayed at Shrivenham to conduct the interviews for candidates.

Lieutenant Shenandoah Blessing entered Sean’s office. He was an immense man who walked with the peculiar gracefulness that some fat people develop from constantly fighting for their balance. In the first handshake, Sean detected both the deceptive quickness and the power of the man.

“You were sheriff of Hook County, Tennessee, for nine years?”

A voice filled with folksy sweetness emerged from Blessing’s moon face. He answered in the affirmative.

“And you went through a dozen special courses at F.B.L training schools ...”

Blessing modestly admitted to his credentials. There were a few more formal questions, but Sean had known all along that Blessing would be his man. Hook County was similar in size and population to Rombaden/Romstein. Hook County was rough territory with difficult police problems. Despite Blessing’s guise at modesty he had a known reputation for progressive law enforcement and his record was filled with innumerable examples of personal courage and ingenuity.

“The police problem in Rombaden is going to be particularly difficult because we haven’t enough whitelisted Germans to direct traffic. It’s Nazi top to bottom.”

“How many boys am I going to be able to take in with me?”

“I think I can get you twenty.”

Twenty men to handle a hundred thousand enemy civilians plus unknown numbers of soldiers, fanatics, displaced persons. They would have to be hand-picked, trained like spartans, and damned near fearless as well as cagey as hell.

“Can I pick my own people?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, I reckon we’ll muddle through, Major.”

The oldest man Sean had tabbed was also chosen without a shade of doubt. Captain H. W. Trueblood was sixty-two years of age. His unique qualifications and determination to participate in the war had brought him to Shrivenham. Trueblood had been a curator for the National Gallery in London, specializing in the middle German periods. He spoke a fluent German and was totally immersed in German history.

Trueblood was pale as only an Englishman who never sees the sun can be pale. He spoke in hushed tones, never really addressing anyone in particular. The perfect scholar, Sean thought.

“Are you familiar with the Roman Kunsthalle in Rombaden?”

“Yes, of course.” And Trueblood quickly refreshed his memory aloud. “Extraordinary representation of the second German period ... Hans Pleydenwurff, Wolgemut. They must have several Van Soests and I know of four Grünewalds. Then, of course, their own Schwaben masters, Konrad Witz and Lucas Moser ...”

“Of course,” Sean said, fascinated by the “foreign” language he spoke.

Trueblood suddenly reminded himself there was a layman before him and tried to correct himself. “I speak of course of the fifteenth-century Cologne and Flemish schools.”

“Sure.”

“There is an excellent portion given to Renaissance Germans. The Von Romstein family has supported the museum heavily, you know.”

“Just how difficult is it going to be to get an accurate catalogue which will also include the cathedral and the Romstein Castle?”

“Well, one hardly knows where the paintings have been transported since the bombings, does one?” And as an afterthought mumbled, “Be a terrible pity if they lost their Moser altar ...”

Another Englishman, Dr. Geoffrey Grimwood, had retired from the army as an Officer of the British Empire. He had served in India as a hospital director in a place where famine and epidemic were academic. After army retirement he took a high post in the public health service. Like Trueblood, he did not want the war to pass him by.

Through his sandy walrus moustache Grimwood imparted to Sean that he spoke passable German and had attended seminars on public health at the Rombaden Medical College before the war.

There was another British officer, W. W. Tidings, from the German department of Barclay’s Bank, who was a wizard in that mystic realm of international currency.

There was a Canadian, Bertrand Collier, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany, and later, news analyst for Canadian Broadcasting.

There were Americans: Dale Hickman, who was well known as an agricultural economist; Sam Alterman, a communications engineer with International Tel. and Tel.

There was Bill Bolinski, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer whose father was Polish and mother was German, and he spoke both languages well. In addition to legal officer he was made displaced persons officer.

There was Hank Greenberg, a civil engineer who was born in Germany and began his schooling at Humboldt University in Berlin and completed it at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. City planning was his bailiwick. Commissioned into the Army in 1940, he had planned and constructed a half-dozen new army bases when A. J. Hansen snatched him away for Military Government.

But for the fact that he was Jewish, Greenberg had a complete Germanic appearance: thick dark brows, large brown eyes, tall limber build. He showed no reaction to Sean’s hammering questions.

“You were born in Mannheim?”

“Yes. During World War I, where my father was a good German soldier. In fact he holds an Iron Cross,” Greenberg answered with only the slightest trace of accent.

“Jewish, both sides?”

“Completely by birth, moderately by religion. As you can see on your record there, the Hank is really Heinrich.”

“Just what kind of personal persecution did you encounter from the Nazis?”

Greenberg smiled slightly. “My father was smart enough to get out of Germany before Hitler took power. However, it was never far enough back for a Jew in Germany. Anti-Semitism is not a later-day phenomenon. It has been going on for a thousand years, Major.”

“Then it must give you a vicarious thrill knowing Germany is being dismembered by the bombing raids.”

“The same vicarious thrill it gives you, Major. We are both Americans.”

“Do you have any pleasant recollections of Germany?”

“Of course. I spent my childhood there, became a young man there.”

“What language do your parents speak at home?”

“German.”

“What kind of punishment do you feel the Nazis should receive?”

“That is in your province. I am an engineer. I deal in mathematics.”

Sean liked Greenberg, liked his thick skin and deliberate attitude. Yet, there was something about Greenberg he could not put his finger on. Something about him that said there was still a lot of German in the man. Was this so strange? After all, nearly one fifth of the American population is of German ancestry and emigration. And what of his own father? Still Irish to the core of his soul. Despite Greenberg’s facade Sean believed there was a love-hate duel within him.

There was one key man missing from the pilot team. Someone with practical experience in government. From the records, Captain Maurice Duquesne of the Free French Forces had all the obvious qualifications. He was an elected official of an area similar in size to Rombaden/Romstein; sous-préfet of an arrondissement of the Department of Belfort, Province of Lorraine. Duquesne had lived on the German border, opposite the Black Forest, and spoke impeccable German.

But he was arrogant and from the instant of meeting let Sean know the American was a Johnny-come-lately. France knew how to handle Germany. Americans knew nothing.

The decision on Duquesne was his most difficult. Obviously the Frenchman believed he should command his own team. Yet, despite trouble signs, Sean could not let him go.

Sean remembered the first time he saw General Hansen and sized him up as a foul-mouthed, sawed-off blowhard. He learned bit by bit that Hansen was neither crass nor stupid. Hansen had the thing he lacked—experience. There was much to be learned from the man.

Duquesne had practical government experience. Through day to day intercourse he knew more about the Germans than Sean’s scholastic theorizing from a distance of thousands of miles.

He gambled with Maurice Duquesne.

There were others on the pilot team—Americans and British and French. With Blessing’s enlisted man’s police force and the clerks and medics, he brought fifty officers and men back to Queen Mother’s Gate.

General Hansen reasoned that Sean had a good team on paper, but, next to Dante Arosa, Sean was the youngest officer. Could he gain the respect of the older and wiser men? Would he be able to breathe life and fire into the plaster models of Rombaden? Could he change complacency into the spirit of a mission?

Hansen’s doubts soon faded. Sean attacked Rombaden/ Romstein with a zeal that turned the pilot-team studies into something of a crusade.

Even the arrogant Maurice Duquesne showed traces of respect for the energy of the man and called a truce. For now, Major O’Sullivan was a dynamo, but these maps and questions and problems in theory were far removed from the field of battle. Duquesne knew that most battle plans go awry when the first shot is fired, and he reserved his final judgment for that day....

The pilot team was knitted into an exclusive, proud unit. Sean O’Sullivan had mastered a page from Andrew Jackson Hansen’s textbook. He was able to muster uncommon loyalty from his men by letting a man know he was needed. At the same time he let him know he could do without him also.

Chapter Eleven

SEAN ENTERED HANSEN’S OFFICE. Nellie Bradbury and Henry Pringle sat chalky-faced on the big leather couch. Hansen’s expressive face was wrinkled in pain.

Sean’s palms became wet and his throat caked dry. Oh God! I’m dreaming! Sean tried again and again to force the question from himself. He broke into cold sweat.

“Your brother Tim is dead,” General Hansen said at last.

Sean nodded his head to say that he knew, and he walked to the window and stared blankly down on the courtyard with his back to the others. Ten unbearable moments of silence passed with the only sound a deep quivering sigh from Sean now and again.

“He went after a V-1 base,” Bradbury said. “This time he led some others in. They saw him get it.”

Hansen took Sean’s arm and led him to a chair. “Here son, have yourself a drink.”

Sean pushed his arm away. They watched him stiffen to fight off a convulsion. A numbness fell over him.

“Let yourself go,” Big Nellie said.

And then, only the terrible silence again and Sean’s dazed expression.

“He was one of the best, Tim O’Sullivan was,” Henry Pringle said in an almost cheerful voice. “A flyer’s flyer. Went out big. He won’t ever be forgotten.”

“Shut up, you stinking ghoul,” General Hansen hissed. “It makes me sick the way you goddamned flyers worship death.”

“Lay off him, General,” Big Nellie said. “Pringle and I have cried for these boys till there’s no tears left and no other way to send them off.”

“You think we celebrate because we’re happy? We’re scared and sick and we all die of fright every night when the door opens and half a squadron walks in ...”

They quieted as Sean stood and walked from the room.

The needle of his father’s record player scratched out through the sound horn a distorted reproduction of John McCormack’s voice:

“Kathleen Mavourneen! awake from thy slumber,

The blue mountains glow in the sun’s golden light...”

“You listen to me, Tim. I had to take two fights to pay for your tuition. You’re not running away to the Lincoln Brigade. I busted this hand getting you into college and I’ll bust the other one on you keeping you there.”

“... Ah! where is the spell that once hung on my numbers?

Arise in thy beauty, thou star of my night.”

A sudden shift of the wind whipped the spray into the cave and onto the three brothers. Liam shielded the book from the water. Sean and Tim watched the waves fall back, slither down the rocks and race seaward again. Liam read from the book again, in his thin voice.

“He fell as fall the mighty ones,

Nobly undaunted to the last,

And death has now united him,

With Erin’s heroes of the past.”

Parnell! As Liam read, Tim’s eyes searched wildly for those places beyond the horizon where adventures waited, not only in daydreams. “Read from O’Casey, Liam!”

“You and your Irish patriots make me sick,” Sean said.

“Mavourneen, Mavourneen, my sad tears are falling,

To think that from Erin and thee I must part;”

“How in the hell can you remain so impersonal to a war that’s taken our brother! ...We were coming over German land ... I almost always saw Liam’s face outside the window ...and then ... I would visualize Liam’s grave ... I wanted to fly so low I could chop them up with my propellers.”

“Stop carrying the flag, Tim.”

“Oh God! Why does the wrong brother have to die! ...Liam could have brought us honor.”

“It may be for years, and it may be forever;

Then why art thou silent, thou voice of my heart?”

“Your father is a very sick man, Sean. It will take months of rest and care for him to recover from this attack and he will never be the same as before.”

“Poppa, you’re not to worry about anything. I’ll take care of the family.”

Private Liam O’Sullivan, a poet. A gentle boy. Dead. Age twenty-two. Kasserine Pass, North Africa. Died as quietly as he lived.

First Lieutenant Timothy O’Sullivan. Rebel. Age twenty-five. He died somewhere over Germany in a flaming pyre ... as violently as he lived.

“It may be for years, and it may be forever;

Then why are thou silent, Kathleen Mavourneen?”

“Sean. It’s me, Dante. You can’t keep sitting like this in the darkness. Sean, for God’s sake break down and cry. Curse, hit the wall, get drunk. Sean, please answer me. Sean, you can’t keep sitting in the darkness ... Sean ... Sean ...”

He blinked his eyes open and licked his dry lips. Father O’Brien slowly came into focus. “You’ve been locked in here for five days. Tim has made his way to heaven. The living must be served.”

He came to a sitting position slowly, sipped some water, and lit a cigarette. He was weak and haggard and dizzy. “Father,” he croaked hoarsely, “I don’t want to listen to any Jesuit double-talk.”

“The spiritual aspects can be explored later. I’m thinking of something more practical, like eating a decent meal. If you don’t come out of here you’re going to be taken to the hospital and fed intravenously.”

Sean flopped back on the bed again and returned to his reverie.

“It would be a lot better for you if you sent your brother off in good Irish style. Let’s go out and get drunk and split open a couple of heads.”

“Father O’Brien, go to hell.” Sean trembled awesomely. For the first time, a tear fell down his cheek. “Oh Timmy! Timmy! This will kill Momma and Poppa.”

The priest sat beside him quickly. “You’ve lost your belief in God, haven’t you? We’ve all waged that struggle, Sean. Even Jesus.”

“I believe in God all right, but he is not a loving God. He’s a monster. He allowed His only son to get lynched and now He keeps killing those who love Him the most. God has destroyed my family.”

“This murder that was committed in God’s name is not His doing. It is the folly of men who wrongly claim to do murder in His name.”

“Why didn’t I die instead of Liam and Tim!”

“Sean! So long as you lie flat on your back, you debase the memory of your brothers. Stand up, Sean!”

General Hansen was distressed at the weary appearance of Sean. After days of harrowing grief he looked like a combat soldier who had just waged a terrible battle.

“I’m ready to return to my command. I’m ... sorry I put such a burden on everyone.”

“There is a matter that has to be thrashed out. Are you up to it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are the sole survivor of three brothers. Your family has given more than its share.”

“I don’t want to go back to the States.”

“The matter is out of your hands. It is up to your parents. You realize that they have this right.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I contacted an old buddy of mine who is stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco. I asked him to call on your parents and explain the position.”

“How are they ...”

“As well as can be expected.”

“What ... did they decide?”

“I don’t know. Your father wrote a letter. It was flown here and handed to me by personal courier.” The general held the envelope. Sean read his name spelled in a tired and shaky hand. “Will you abide by your father’s decision in peace?”

“Yes, sir ... would ... would the General please read it to me?”

“Very well.” Hansen adjusted his specs, bent close to the uneven writing, and cleared his throat.

My Beloved Son:

My heart cries out for you in this time of your great need! I am so sorry I am not close by to comfort you. It is needless to say that a terrible darkness has fallen upon this house. I have always been honest with you, Sean. I will not lie now. The truth is that I do not know if either your mother or I can live long after this.

It is for you I sorrow now for you must go on living. You are the last of our seed. You are the one who will either carry our name on beyond us or forever put it to rest.

Your mother and I have no tears left. Our pain can be no deeper. I cannot in all honesty say that the death of three sons can be more terrible than the death of two. If you must join them, then you must.

I would give my life to embrace you once more, my son. I have sat for many hours to put upon paper the words that will force you to come back to us safely. Yet, I cannot do this thing. I have tried to teach you all your life that you must follow your own conscience. I cannot deny you that pursuit now. You cannot live for Tim and Liam. You must live for Sean.

You have served our name longer and more faithfully than a boy ought to. You have denied yourself for us so long ... you have worked for us, so hard.

You are free.

I beg you, Sean, do not be consumed with hatred for it will destroy you as it did Tim. And remember, we have done all we have set out to do. I am but an immigrant laborer and I have lived to see my three sons graduate from college.

Hansen gave the letter to Sean. “What a fine man,” the general said. “Sean, I want to use you in here with me as my adjutant. I want you to give up your command.”

“Give up my command?”

“You’re asking too much of yourself. After what has happened I don’t think you or anyone else could be placed in a position of direct contact with Germans. Your judgment would be too clouded now.”

A familiar rumble outside had been building up in intensity ever since Sean entered the office. Suddenly it became overwhelming. The roar made further conversation impossible; the windows rattled and the building trembled at its moorings. Sean and General Hansen went to the window—for once the London sky was clear. Wave after wave of Liberator bombers lumbered like flying whales toward the coast. The invasion of Europe could not be far off now.

“General Hansen,” Sean said. “I want my command.”

Chapter Twelve

NAN MILFORD FLUNG THE door open. Andrew Jackson Hansen stood before her. Her expression changed from anticipation to obvious disappointment.

“I am General Hansen,” he said. “May I come in?”

“Of course.”

All the trappings of a reunion were in evidence: a magnificent woman in an attractive hostess gown; a candlelit table in the alcove; music from the gramophone, and dim lights. He trailed her into the living room. She was, indeed, beautiful, but ice and anger too.

“Major O’Sullivan had to leave for Shrivenham unexpectedly.”

“At your personal arrangement?”

“May I sit down?”

“By all means.”

“Mrs. Milford. We have some unpleasant things to say to each other. I’d like a drink.” Nan coldly poured him one. He did not like the situation. He would rather have taken on anyone than an angry woman.

“As long as we are going to be candid,” Nan said, “I should like to know just how far your command extends into the personal lives of your men.”

“Mrs. Milford ...”

“And I should like to know why you have deliberately kept me from him at a time like this. Even my phone calls were stopped.”

“Because, this is the time you should have been kept from him.”

“I do not understand your ideas of compassion, General.”

“That boy is so badly hurt he even denies his God.”

“He’s needed me, General.”

“Yes, he has. Needing you is bad enough when he is sound. What if he crawls to you now and throws himself into your merciful arms?”

“Isn’t love to be given when it is most needed?”

“Yes, Mrs. Milford, but you cannot give it ... you can merely lend it.”

Nan paled.

“You are offering a crutch to a wounded man. I would like to see him healed. Either prepare to go through with this all the way, divorce, remarriage, the works ... or let him live his own life, without you.”

Nan arched her back and fought back the tears forming in her eyes. “He thinks the world of you, General Hansen. It borders on worship.”

“He is worshiped, too. This boy took over the command of older, wiser men who had already cut their niches as talented specialists and he has molded them together. Since this tragedy his team has all but disintegrated. Now, all of us who love Sean O’Sullivan must give that love in the way it will help him the most. His men will give it to him through dedication. His father gave it to him through the gift of manhood, by allowing him to pursue the dictates of his conscience. I have let him know I believe in him. I have returned him to his command ...”

“And I ...”

“You know what you have to do, Mrs. Milford.”

“Has it been ghastly for him?”

“I have seldom seen a human being suffer so deeply.”

“My poor Sean ... my poor darling.”

Nan pressed her folded hands tightly, drew a deep breath, and shook her head quickly. It was over just like that! In the end, which she had always known would come, Nan reverted to her breeding. The dreaded loneliness, the fear of time stretching endlessly before her suddenly vanished in a well of compassion for Sean. General Hansen knew why Sean loved her so ...why he needed her and why she could not have him now.

“I shall be leaving in the morning for Plimlington East to see my children. I have been thinking that a holiday for just the three of us would be a wonderful tonic. We could disappear somewhere up in Scotland. I know of places where they don’t even have a telephone.”

Hansen set his glass down, walked to her, and took her hand.

“Will he forget me?”

“No, but he’ll get over you.”

She nodded. “That’s it then, isn’t it? ...”

“You do love him very much.”

“General,” her voice cracked, “please go ...”

Chapter Thirteen

April 20,1945

IT WAS EVENING. MAJOR Sean O’Sullivan sped down a German country road, second in line in the convoy of jeeps, command cars, and trucks making up Pilot Team G-5. Sean always took the second jeep, Maurice Duquesne the first. The Frenchman drove like a maniac; no one dared drive with him on his tail.

The cobblestone road was rain-slick and jarring. They passed through never ending forests, birch trees adding dark and eerie patterns to the miserable rain-soaked road. Sean hunched closer to the windshield.

Dr. Geoffrey Grimwood grimaced alongside Sean. From time to time low mumbles emerged through his moustache protesting the monstrous construction of the jeep.

In the back seat, Sean’s orderly, Private O’Toole, attempted to dismember three sticks of chewing gum. The massive Shenandoah Blessing slept, crushing O’Toole against the side of the jeep. His moon face rolled loosely on his neck and fell on O’Toole’s shoulder. The son of a bitch sleeps anywhere, O’Toole thought ... through the Siegfried Line, across the Rhine, anywhere. Look at the ugly son of a bitch sleep with the rain leaking in and falling down his ugly neck. O’Toole shouldered Blessing’s head off him and tried to displace the limp body. It all rolled back on him.

A roadblock loomed ahead. The convoy drew to a halt before a submachine-gun-toting corporal. Sean got out, drew his poncho about him, and approached the guard.

“Password.”

“Wishing well,” Sean said, using the pair of “w’s” designed to twist the most willing German tongue.

One of these days I’m going to say “vishing vell” and scare the hell out of one of these guards, O’Toole thought.

“Glenn Miller,” said the guard.

“ ‘Moonlight Serenade,’ ” Sean answered.

“Hit me again.”

“ ‘Tuxedo Junction,’ ‘Little Brown Jug,’ ‘Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand.’ ” Sean imparted distinctive Americanisms.

“Pershing Square.”

“Queers.”

Silly damned game, Grimwood thought. The Americans go to ridiculous extremes to identify each other.

The guard was convinced the convoy was not German infiltrators. He advised Sean they were at the end of the line and a regimental headquarters was in a farmhouse in a clearing a few hundred yards removed.

“All right. Pull the convoy over. Put on a guard. Set up a bivouac.”

Sean, followed by his watchdog, O’Toole, slushed his way to the clearing and the farmhouse. Colonel Dundee welcomed them grumpily. “Dandy” Dundee, a self-made soldier, attempted to live up to his legend. His ulcer was killing him. He scratched his stubble jaw. “You guys from Military Government are always up my back.”

“Matter of fact, Colonel, we’ve been waiting to get to Rombaden for almost a year.”

“Ever drink this crap? Steinhager.”

Sean accepted the bottle, took a belt, passed it to O’Toole.

Dundee brought him up to date. He had sent a patrol into Rombaden and it had gotten clobbered. He drew back, dug in, and brought up two battalions of Long Toms and a battalion of tanks. They were now getting into position in the forest. Heavy mortars were pushed up forward so they could at least reach the suburbs. Dundee meant to hit Rombaden throughout the night with everything that would reach the city. In the morning a hundred air sorties were promised. Dundee belched the belch of a man whose stomach was in constant rebellion. Then he looked at Sean devilishly, as though he were about to impart a monumental secret. “Major,” he said with solemnity, “I’m going to cross the Landau tonight, two miles downstream.”

“Got a bridge?”

“Hell no! The goddam engineer battalion is lost. We’re going over in rubber boats.”

Dundee reckoned he could shuttle a battalion of men across the river under cover of darkness. Morning would find Rombaden cut off. Furthermore, he could move part of his men to the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp to engage the expected resistance from the Waffen SS.

Sean returned to the bivouac to check his team. They had been living off the countryside since they had passed through the Siegfried Line. Blessing’s men had already rounded up enough local livestock and three-in-one ration for a decent meal. Shelter halves had been set. The older men on the team—Tidings, Trueblood, Collier, Duquesne—were given the back of the trucks to sleep in. Geoffrey Grimwood qualified by age, but his long military service made him proudly refuse; he slept on the ground.

Sean went to the edge of the forest. There were only waterlogged shadows ahead. The Landau River could not be seen on the horizon, gray on gray. Rombaden was out there somewhere. The colors of the earth had been turned sallow, muck and mud alive and moving with infantrymen.

The perimeter was an open field close to the suburbs of Rombaden, interlaced with crudely dug foxholes and trenches of riflemen, mortars, and machine guns.

By nightfall the rain had stopped. In their forest bivouac the wind blew down endless sheets of water from the leaves, keeping everyone in a state of soggy discomfort.

But by now weariness had overcome the men of Pilot Team G-5. They had reached that state of delicious numbness when all pain and misery ceased, when one could hardly remember living without mud. They had devoured a pig and a half-dozen German chickens, so life was not without its redemptions; and then they slept. They slept except for the commander, for when others sleep, the commander ponders.

The Long Tom cannons and the tanks flashed up lights every few seconds as their muzzles spewed gunflame. Up forward the heavy mortars hissed and the red tracers of machine-gun bullets darted toward Rombaden.

Sean leaned against a tree at the edge of the forest. O’Toole hovered a few yards away, hands on his carbine, alert for intruders.

Well Tim, Sean thought, I have seen the Germans. I did not see them through the window of a streaking airplane, scrambling like ants from a stream of hot water. I saw them herded by the acre, dull-eyed and beaten. I saw them limp along in endless lines with their hands over their heads. I saw them slurp water from our canteens with trembling hands, and dive for our cigarette butts. I saw them too weary and disgusted to care about the disgrace of capture.

A sudden burst of fire in Rombaden revealed the outline of some buildings. Sean watched it until the flames flickered and began to fade.

It was strange seeing Germans. I didn’t hate them. No desire to punch them, trample them ... to say, “Which one of you pulled the trigger that killed Liam?” They were abstract hulks. These creatures could not have been the jack-booted, goose-stepping, hysterical Sieg Heilers. They were nothing ... nothing.

Liam ... Liam, you never got to see them at all. Maybe it is better that way. Have it quick and be done. I’ve got to live with them ... and think about you and Tim.

Greenberg. What was he thinking when we entered Mannheim and he stood before a house and said that this was where he was born?

Oh God, Nan. I’ve been so damned lonely for you. Why were my letters returned? Why was the phone never answered? You’re a cold-blooded bitch but I still love you. I love you now. That terrible moment of humiliation. At the theater on the arm of a British colonel. Nan was back to her own kind. She looked correct on his arm ... like he was G. Donald Milford. Just a nod of the head, that’s all she had for me, and the one final sentence, “It won’t work, Sean. I don’t want a scene, now or ever. ...”

Well, they’ll be breaking open the oflag with G. Donald Milford in it pretty soon now.

All his thoughts began to run together ... the landing in Southern France ... the battle up the Rhone Valley ... the breaking of the Siegfried Line ... the crossing of the Rhine ... the fields of prisoners. ...

And now ... Rombaden lay out there.

Captain Maurice Duquesne walked from the bivouac and stood alongside Sean, looking in rapt fascination at the bombardment. He had taken bottles of wine and cognac out of France with him, and he passed one of them to Sean, who sipped and passed it back.

“What does one think of at one-thirty in the morning?”

“What have we left undone?”

When the Frenchman spoke or walked or drank wine he did it always with a certain gesture of his hands, a flair in his voice, his eyes. He was arrogant. Yet, he had been loyal to the team and, Sean thought, perhaps its most valuable officer. “Aha, our little paper battles at Queen Mother’s Gate.”

“You never have believed in what we were doing there.”

The Frenchman shrugged. “General de Gaulle ordered me into Military Government because of my experience.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You and I have become personal friends. I do not hold you responsible because Americans are naive.”

“American naiveté is flaunted around pretty freely.”

“Take the Englishman, Sean. Take Grimwood. He knows how to rule. He knows how to conquer. And we French ... we have our little experiences also. But the Americans know neither how to conquer nor occupy. You fight your wars in behalf of neatly phrased idealism ... and then you go back to a place that has never tasted its own ashes.”

“Is it so wrong to believe in ideals?”

“Impractical. Do you really think you can learn about Germans at Queen Mother’s Gate? When you Americans leave, Germany will be here and France will be here. We have lived with the German and tasted his whip and he has tasted ours. We have mingled sweat in bed with the German women and they with French women. That is the way you must get to know people.”

“But your way hasn’t worked, Maurice. All this sweaty mingling and all your experience has produced nothing but centuries of blood and sorrow. Perhaps you shouldn’t grow deaf to the ideas of a stranger.”

“Sean! You honestly think you can change the basic nature of the German.”

“I have to.”

“I am a cynic by experience ... you are a fool by the lack of it.”

Sean wanted to say, “I believe in my country,” but he didn’t. The practical politician who had conquered and been conquered would not understand anything so maudlin.

O’Toole hurried up to them excitedly. “They’ve crossed the Landau!”

“Well then,” Duquesne said, “let us get some sleep. Rombaden faces an enlightened conqueror tomorrow.”

Chapter Fourteen

DAWN CAME WITH A crispness that gave a new life to the wet misery of the soldiers; and it brought the news that during the night a battalion of infantry had crossed the Landau in rubber boats and now held the south bank.

The day was clear, and at last they saw it ...Rombaden! The ribbon of water sweeping into the big bend, the cluster of red-tiled roofs, the lush green, and the great tower of Marienkirche. Fighter planes flying at house-top level bolted new fury into the smoking ruins.

Sean ordered the camp to be struck and the convoy to be in ready to move on the heels of a breakthrough.

At 7:22 the firing suddenly stopped. Sean rushed to regimental headquarters, where Colonel Dundee was on the phone to his forward positions. Three German officers under truce flag had come out of Rombaden and were approaching the observation post in an attempt to save the city from annihilation by a street fight.

Sean did not wait for the formal surrender ceremony. His convoy came out of the forest toward Rombaden ahead of the lumbering tanks and the infantry.

Rombaden began to take form and shape, and then an ethereal silence slowed them down as they touched the suburbs. Little fires sprouted here and there ... there was a distant drone of aircraft looking for targets farther south ... past the first little cottages ... worker’s quarters on the north end ... neat little vegetable gardens ... boxes of flowers in the windows ... roofs with holes in them ... chunks of plaster gouged out by bullets ... signs in Gothic ... “Backerei” ... “Hofmeyer’s Bierstube” ... “Apotheke” ... broken window fronts ... a house blown into the street by a direct hit.

Sean turned the convoy into the main boulevard, Friedrichstrasse, that led straight through Rombaden to the City Hall Square. It was a street of the dead. Tens of thousands of white flags of surrender welcomed the victors. The flags hung limply and the three-story buildings that lined the Friedrichstrasse were in wreckage. War had come cruelly to Friedrichstrasse. There were enormous piles of waste, charred and flaming skeletons of buildings whose walls stood by some unknown determination. All of the windows were gone and most of the roofs; the street-car line was snaked out of shape and useless; power poles snapped off; trees uprooted.

The convoy slowed to a whisper of speed.

At an intersection a dead horse lay in a pool of its own blood, swarmed over by hungry flies.

How strange, Sean thought: in every town and village a dead horse has lain open-eyed and puzzled by man’s folly.

The eyes of the men of the pilot team searched up at the broken windows knowing that tens of thousands of unseen eyes were on them. Only a fluttering of a curtain, a darting shadow, a muffled sound told of human life behind the ruins.

A single little boy stood in a doorway shading his eyes from the sun. He wore a pair of leather pants with such filth as only leather pants can gather. He was curious. A door opened behind him and the hand of a terrified mother jerked him from sight of the enemy.

The intersection where Friedrichstrasse met the City Hall Square was closed by a pile of brick and twisted steel ten feet high.

Sean halted the convoy. By hand signals they moved after him as he sprinted up the mound of bricks. Skittering and stumbling they came behind him to the City Hall Square on the Landau. The square was pocked by artillery-shell holes, the buildings cut up badly by the strafing. Sean looked first to the Marienkirche. The cathedral had been hit, but the tower with its magnificent onion dome stood by one of those miracles saved for the preservation of churches. The statue of Mary before the cathedral had been obliterated.

The half-mile-long row of buildings, the Medical College, the theater, the hospital, were all shakily intact. The statue of Hinterseer was headless on its pedestal.

All that broke the awesome silence was the shuffling of their trotting feet as they split up, began flinging doors open, moving in well-learned sequence toward those places they had seen on paper for so many months. Sean found himself running full head for the City Hall at the opposite end of the square, with Dante Arosa and O’Toole puffing behind him. Before the great building the statue of the gods Berwin and Helga, of the legend, remained intact. Damned irony! Hinterseer is headless, Mary is gone, but the pagan remains!

The door had been blown off its hinges, revealing the marble foyer filled with statues of the Von Romstein family and coat-of-arms shields of each district. Sean’s team moved in behind him up the spiral stairs, shoving open the office door. Everything was in perfect order, set for a day’s work.

The corner office on the second floor bore the name of the mayor, Baron Sigmund Von Romstein. Sean entered. It was a magnificent office. On one side the windows looked down on the City Hall Square, the other afforded a view of the Landau and the country beyond. He could see puffs of smoke and tracer-bullet streaks across the river in the district. Dundee’s battalion had engaged the enemy, perhaps the Waffen SS from the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp. The scene on the square changed by the moment. A tank plowed through ... now two ... three. Soldiers began swarming in. The engineers moved to the waterfront. Both bridges were useless. A pontoon bridge was started so that tanks and artillery could cross to join the battle in Romstein District.

Then there was an ominous grinding sound. It rumbled over the square. The gears of the ancient bell clock in the cathedral tower wound up to toll the hour. It bonged nine times with earth-shaking veracity.

“Major,” O’Toole said, “there’s a kraut officer outside.”

“Send him in.”

Sean walked deliberately to the desk of the mayor and sat behind it. The German entered, stood ramrod before the desk, and bowed slightly. He was meticulously uniformed for this occasion of defeat, as though blood and mud were not a part of his trade. The German was a strange contrast to the dirty and tired O’Sullivan.

He rattled quickly that he was the senior officer and wished to know if Sean would have a surrender ceremony. Sean stood, turning his back to the German. “O’Toole, take this man to Blessing. Tell Blessing this officer is to round up his people, bring them to the square, and stack their arms.”

The German began to protest that it was no way to treat an honorable enemy commander.

“That is all,” Sean cut him off abruptly.

Events moved rapidly. The long training of Pilot Team G-5 was now put into play. They moved about their preordained tasks with such precision that even the cynical Maurice Duquesne was impressed.

Soon German soldiers began straggling into the square. A half-dozen tanks and a company of Dundee’s infantry formed a picket around them. The Germans limped in with the same dejection that had marked other beaten men from France to Rombaden. Their plight and their humiliation was intensified by surrender inside one of their own cities. The pile of arms grew higher, until the square held several thousand soldiers.

Some of them were beardless boys in their teens. Others were old men. These were the People’s Army. The last-ditch home defense.

The German officers stood in a clique away from their men as though the soldiers were contaminated.

Curious civilians began to peek about with caution. Walking close to the buildings at a creeping pace, holding a respectful distance from the prisoners.

“It is over.”

“It is over.”

“It is over.”

They milled about and gawked in dazed confusion. Some wept with grief and some wept with relief. “It is over.”

By late afternoon a dozen or more of the civic officials had been hauled in; however, neither Count Ludwig nor Baron Sigmund Von Romstein nor their younger brother Kurt had been found.

The square was now mobbed with frightened, glassy-eyed people. Sean O’Sullivan came downstairs and faced them from the steps of City Hall. He ordered the flags of the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union hoisted above the building and his first order posted.

PROCLAMATION #1: APRIL 21, 1945

Attention! Citizens of Rombaden!

This city has unconditionally surrendered to Allied Forces. City Hall is hereby designated as Headquarters of Allied Forces Military Government.

No further resistance will be tolerated.

You are under the supreme command of the Allied representative.

All German courts, schools, banks, transportation and communications within city limits are hereby suspended. All business is suspended. The police force is hereby disbanded.

All members of the German armed forces will surrender themselves with their firearms immediately in the City Hall Square. All firearms will be deposited at the City Hall immediately.

All motor vehicles are hereby requisitioned.

All warehouses are hereby requisitioned.

All stores and petrol are hereby confiscated.

All German penal law is hereby suspended.

Rombaden is under curfew from 1900 to 0600 daily. Violators will be shot on sight.

All theaters, cinemas, radio stations, newspapers and other publications will suspend operations immediately.

The Mayor, Sanitation Officer, District Mayors, Medical Officer, Police Chief, City Engineer and their immediate subordinates will report immediately to Allied Headquarters.

All other civilians are hereby ordered to return to their homes and stay until notified.

By order of: Sean O’Sullivan, Major, United States Army. Military Governor of Rombaden/ Romstein.

Chapter Fifteen

DEAR GENERAL HANSEN,

As we planned, I am writing these informal impressions on the basis of the first 72 hours. Dundee’s Regiment is meeting stiff opposition from the Waffen SS in Romstein District so my Team has not crossed the river, yet. We’ve got our hands full, here.

In Rombaden, resistance collapsed. The population is demoralized, scared stiff and getting hungry. So far we have averted panic, epidemic and serious crime, but the place is one hell of a mess.

Here’s a thumbnail and unofficial survey. Hank Greenberg, my engineer, estimates 40 per cent of all housing completely destroyed, 20 per cent partly destroyed. He has a monumental demolition problem to raze the unsafe buildings. As for the rubble, he says it may be years before it is all cleared. The power plant is 60 per cent out but one of the generators is operable. No light or electricity for the civilian population is possible for months. The telegraph lines are completely down. The phone system is about 30 per cent in operation. All public transportation is kaput. The radio station is completely demolished and cannot transmit. Both bridges are down. The rail yard and boat yards are the damnedest messes you’ve ever seen. Both inoperable. The Machine Works is 85 per cent destroyed above the ground (but there is a vast underground assembly plant which used slave labor from the concentration camp) and the other factories about 80 per cent destroyed. Tell the fly boys their aim was pretty good.

Our urgent problem right now is that the sewage plant and waterworks are both out of order. Dr. Grimwood, my health officer, has declared the river contaminated. We have been using water wells and have rationed the Germans to one bucket of water per day per family.

As for sewage removal, we have set up a honey-bucket system. The buckets are collected daily and carted out of town. We have been using arrested Blacklisted Nazis on this working detail. It’s good for them.

Meanwhile, the sewage plants and waterworks have our A-1 priority. Greenberg believes we can get them in at least partial working order in time to avert an epidemic.

Grimwood believes that present medical facilities can handle a small emergency (because of the Medical College) but, of course, we don’t know the medical problems we face when the concentration camp is liberated.

On the plus side.

Seizure of the banks, newspapers, business firms, etc., has gone off without a hitch.

We have formed two labor battalions who, along with some 2500 POW’s, have started rubble clearance, demolition, etc.

Blessing has seized the jail and has been able to keep law and order with his meager force. The people are too beaten to offer opposition. We have one of Dundee’s companies doing guard duty and use them as a “back up” force. Blessing and Arosa have rounded up over a hundred Blacklist so far (our honey-bucket brigade).

The Romankunsthalle is okay. So is the cathedral. However, Trueblood will have a curator’s nightmare as everything has been crated and stored in basements for safekeeping.

Speaking of irony, Dante Arosa and Duquesne found intact all the legal records, births, deaths, marriages for Rombaden/ Romstein for the last three decades. Why they weren’t destroyed is a mystery. It is too early to say what these records will turn up, but you can bet it will be plenty.

We weren’t so lucky with the Nazi records. Kurt Von Romstein, the Nazi Gauleiter, destroyed their records, then committed suicide. So far, neither brother, Baron Sigmund or Count Ludwig, has shown up.

In all, these people have brought an unbelievable disaster upon themselves. I think that the quick reaction of our team held the line. I think we can continue to hold the line and keep a semblance of human life going except for one problem which looks insurmountable.

Dale Hickman, my food man, says there’s enough stores m reserve for about six weeks at a minimum ration of 1200 calories per day. The main source of food is in the District but he suspects there will be a poor harvest. Even in the best of times this area could not support itself in food production. I have delayed issuing food-ration cards until we open the concentration camp. I feel the inmates there rate a priority on the food. For now, we have soup kitchens. But, the food situation must get worse before it improves. The specter of starvation is real.

We are just too damned busy heading off disaster here to think of either the minds of the German people or any golden futures. I hear that things are about the same all over Germany. I have kept my promise and have not sought either personal vengeance or used brutality. But, on the other hand, I feel neither pity, sorrow nor compassion.

Faithfully,

Sean O’Sullivan

Chapter Sixteen

SEAN LIFTED THE RECEIVER. “Major O’Sullivan speaking.”

“One minute, please, Major. We’ve been able to reach Colonel Dundee.”

“Good.”

“Hello ... Dundee speaking.”

“Hello, Colonel. This is Major O’Sullivan. What’s going on over there?”

“We’ve got most of the district cleared, however these bastards are fanatics. I wouldn’t cross over yet.”

“How long?”

“Well, we think we have the last of them trapped at the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp. They’re using the prisoners as shields. We’ve got to go slow.”

“Where can I reach you?”

“Ludwigsdorf. The village is in our hands now. What’s the news?”

“They say Patton has hit the Czech border and the British are about ready to break in to Hamburg. Won’t be long now.”

“Son of a bitch. I wanted to hit the Austrian-Swiss border before Patton got to Czechoslovakia. How are the krauts behaving over there?”

“They’re real peaceful.”

‘Talk to you later.”

O’Toole entered as Sean hung up. “Couple krauts outside want to talk to you, Major.”

“No more personal interviews today.”

O’Toole handed Sean a pair of calling cards. One read: Graf Ludwig Von Romstein, Chancellor, Romstein Landkreis. The second card introduced Baron Sigmund Von Romstein, Oberburgermeister, City of Rombaden.

“Well, well. The mayor’s welcoming committee. Have them wait. Round up Duquesne and Dante Arosa.”

Dante Arosa and the Frenchman flanked Sean on either side of his desk. O’Toole was told to bring the Germans in. The expressions of the three men deliberately concealed their anxiety at finding the centuries-old ruling family of the area. Sean knew them instantly from their identification photos.

Count Ludwig Von Romstein was a German’s German complete with dueling scar. Tall, Teutonic crew-cut blond ... pin-striped ... ramrod ... a grace that belied his fifty years ... a study in German nobility ... the head of the Von Romstein family, the chancellor.

The short, fat, nervous one walked behind him. He was Sigmund, the mayor of Rombaden. Sean now sat in his chair.

They stopped before the desk, the count remaining a step ahead of his brother. He waited for several seconds for the officers to rise and shake hands. Sean neither stood nor did he offer the Germans chairs. Count Ludwig understood that the slight was deliberate, but hid any trace of having noticed it.

“Graf Ludwig Von Romstein,” he said in a clipped, immaculate English, “and my brother, Baron Sigmund Von Romstein.”

“O’Sullivan, Allied Military Governor. My aides, Captain Duquesne and Lieutenant Arosa.”

Count Ludwig nodded his head three times, once in the direction of each. His brother made three deep bows. The little fat one was nervous; he wrung his hands as though he were washing them.

“I should have, reported here earlier,” Ludwig said, obviously speaking for the two of them. “The military capitulation of Rombaden found us across the river at Castle Romstein. It was not until a few hours ago that I was able to get back here.”

Sean said that he understood and considered the delay reasonable.

“I am at your service,” Ludwig said, with a meaningless acceptance of the status quo. His brother, the mayor, had nothing to say.

Intelligence reports were correct. Ludwig completely dominated the family. The baron was not only washing his hands but began sweating profusely.

“Your brother Kurt Von Romstein was Nazi Gauleiter of this district. Is that not so?” Duquesne asked.

“It is correct.”

“He has committed suicide.”

“I have been so informed,” Ludwig said, with a passionless abruptness that startled them. “Now that Ludwigsdorf has fallen, I should like to have my brother’s body transferred to the church there, which has been the traditional family burial ...”

“That can wait,” Sean said.

The German nodded acceptance, showing neither anger nor emotion. Dante handed Sean a thick folder. The photos matched their subjects very well. Sean flipped page after page, scanning the known activities that told a sordid story. He closed it abruptly, having made a sudden decision.

He undipped a single sheet of white paper, glanced at it, slid it to the front of the desk. “This constitutes notification that your lands and property are confiscated and all your known assets are frozen.”

If Ludwig was annoyed he did nothing to show it. He did not so much as look at the document. “I should like to be informed of my legal recourses,” he said.

“You have none,” Sean answered. “Baron,” he continued—the short fat one stepped forward and bowed—“you are to continue as mayor of Rombaden under my directions. Your principal function is to see to it that the civilian population carries out our orders speedily.”

“Yes ... yes ... I shall be honored ...”

“As for you, Count Von Romstein. The position of chancellor is suspended. I have made no final disposition of your case. In the meanwhile I would like your voluntary cooperation.”

“I have placed myself at your service.”

“Lieutenant Arosa will be conducting extensive interrogations.”

“Of course. I have nothing to hide.”

“You’ve got a lot to explain. I am putting you on your honor not to leave the environs of Rombaden. Do you have a residence in the city?”

“The house of my late brother, Kurt, will be suitable.”

“Clear out of Castle Romstein immediately with your family. Take only what personal possessions you can carry in two handbags. Report your address to the clerk outside. You are dismissed.”

Graf Ludwig Von Romstein smiled thinly at the three men before him, conveying the obvious message that the inferior pigs who sat in judgment constituted a temporary situation. His fat brother bowed his way out of the door backwards.

“Well,” Duquesne said, “how do you like the Germans now?”

Dante Arosa blew a long breath and peeled the wrapper off a cigar he had bummed from Colonel Dundee. “You shouldn’t have let them go, Sean. Both of them are right on top of the Blacklist.”

“They’re not going anywhere,” Sean said.

“You don’t sit sixty miles from the border and not have an escape route mapped out. They’ve probably got half their holdings in Switzerland.”

“No, Dante,” Duquesne said, “Sean is correct. The holdings that make them powerful are right here. The land ... the factory. If they had meant to leave the country they would have done so before now. It is a simple matter to escape to Switzerland. He has made his decision to stay here and gamble for his estate. He was prepared for all the consequences when he walked into this office.”

“Lock him up,” Dante insisted.

“We’ve got too much use for both of them to lock them up.”

Maurice, having agreed with Sean, now turned on him. “Do not think you are able to play a cat and mouse game with this Count Von Romstein. Intrigue is a way of life centuries old. With all due respects, it is foreign to American comprehension. When Dante interrogates him he will have a web of stories woven to make him look like a maiden of pure driven snow.”

Sean did not argue. He wondered if by letting Count Ludwig free he had not overmatched himself.

Baron Sigmund Von Romstein, who by oversight or trickery was still mayor of Rombaden, plopped into an overstuffed chair, devoured by perspiration, heart palpitating.

“Gone,” he lamented, “everything is gone. The villages, Castle Romstein, the Machine Works. Everything is gone.”

“Shut up,” Count Ludwig commanded. Even at this dreadful time his sharp voice stopped his brother’s babbling. “Louts,” Ludwig continued.

“What are they going to do with us?” Sigmund whined.

“For the time being, nothing. They will prod us for information and use us as fronts to do their dirty laundry.”

“We are clean! We have never been Nazi Party members!’’

“No, poor Kurt joined the party for us.”

“And now he is dead. You made him join the party. It was you, Ludwig!” he cried in a rare show of defiance.

The count slapped his brother and hovered above him in rage, his dueling scar darkening to an ugly purple. “Kurt joined the party for the Von Romstein family! Remember that! And you will control yourself, Sigmund. That is just what those people want ... for you to lose your composure before them.”

The baron gasped out that he understood.

“I have made the decision. We will remain here,” Ludwig continued.

“I am afraid of that American major. He hates us.”

“You need not be. He is an American obsessed by the stringent rules of fair play. What the devil do the Americans know about the game of war and conquest? What do they know about ruling a people? They are a mongrelized race protected by isolation from the realities of ashes and blood. Mark my words, when the last shot is fired the Americans will cry to go home. You can thank God the Russians didn’t get here first ... or even the French.”

“I don’t know. I saw something in this one’s eyes. I tell you, he means to ruin us.”

“Nonsense. As for the other two, it will be a pleasure for the young idiot with the Italian name to interrogate us. But ... be careful of the Frenchman.”

“Careful for what? They have already taken everything.”

“We shall get it all back. The Von Romstein family has lived through this crisis a hundred times. Let them make their accusations. Let them jail us. But we have time, Sigmund. We have time and we have heirs. One year, five, ten. It will all be restored to us eventually, with proper apology. The Americans will go and the French will go ... and there will still be Von Romstein.”

Chapter Seventeen

SEAN’S PHONE RANG. “MAJOR O’Sullivan.”

“This is Captain Armour, with Colonel Dundee’s outfit. We’ve broken into the concentration camp. Colonel Dundee says to get over here right away with your health officer.”

“What’s the picture, Captain?”

“It can’t be described. I’ll pick you up at Ludwigsdorf and lead you in.”

“We’ll be right over.”

They crossed over the pontoon bridge to the south bank of the Landau in two jeep loads. Downstream they passed the magnificent estates, the Kurhaus Casino, the spa hotels, then swung inland into the district countryside. In the excitement Sean had forgotten and let Maurice Duquesne follow him. He corrected the situation and let the Frenchman take the lead. There was Grimwood, mumbling about Sean locking up several German Blacklist doctors he needed, Blessing, and, of course, O’Toole.

In the other jeep Bolinski, the lawyer and displaced persons officer, and Dante Arosa prayed for their safety at Duquesne’s wheelsmanship.

Romstein District was lush and pastoral. The unscarred villages they passed seemed to have been at peace for a thousand years. Curious farmers and villagers, knowing now they would not be harmed, studied the speeding American jeeps in half friendliness and some of the children waved.

As they approached Ludwigsdorf, which directly served the Von Romstein estates, they could see Romstein Castle on a hill in the distance. Near the highway there was a small railroad station, used to transport Romstein products; in the center of the village stood a church with a tall tower and onion-shaped dome, a replica of the cathedral in Rombaden. Within its vaults lay centuries of the Von Romstein dynasty’s dead.

Captain Armour flagged them down in the square, jumped into his own jeep, and led them out. The rail line angled sharply and ran parallel with the road into the Schwabenwald Forest. They raced toward the mass of dark green with sunlight coming in flickers as the road snaked through the forest.

A large sign pocked with bullet holes blared out at them: WARNING! CONCENTRATION CAMP GROUNDS! DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT! VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO SEVERE PENALTY! There was a death’s head insignia below the words.

A few dozen battle-weary American soldiers sat along the roadside, backs propped against trees, dull-brained from the fight, digging half-heartedly at cans of ham and nibbling at the chocolate in their rations.

A pretty wooden bridge forded a stream. Nestled about the forest were about fifty lovely cottages with little gardens planted before them. These were the homes of the married SS officers.

A few hundred yards past the cottages they broke into an immense clearing in what must have been dead center of the forest. A high, solid gate blocked them. It was flanked by two empty guard boxes, an archway over the gate. This, too, had a sign. It read: SCHWABENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP. Below it were words of wisdom in Gothic print declaring that all who came here and performed honest labor would redeem their sins.

Once inside this outer gate they were on a street of administrative buildings and barracks of the SS Death’s Head Units. Captain Armour halted before the commandant’s building.

From the moment they had entered Schwabenwald Forest Sean and the others had been aware of a bad odor. They had smelled it before in places where corpses were left to rot. As they drove through the forest it persisted and strengthened. Now it was overwhelming.

From the terrible silence there was little doubt but that they had come to a place of awesome catastrophe. Colonel Dundee stood in the middle of a dozen of his officers and men. With not a single word of greeting he got into his jeep and led Sean’s party down the street to a place where a ten-foot wall of barbed wire ran off in either direction for half a mile. Beyond this wall was a path six feet wide and an inner wall of barbed wire. Conductors on the poles indicated it was electrified. At precisely every thirty yards stood a wooden guard tower with searchlights and machine guns.

They drove into the heart of Schwabenwald.

When the inspection was done they sat about limp and drained and Sean felt himself in the same nightmare as after Tim’s death. How could the human race have come to this?

Colonel Dundee was a man who charted death. Dr. Grimwood had lived with the pained. Blessing had known blood. They were all stunned and silent.

Dante Arosa and Bolinski retched outside the office; young O’Toole cried.

Maurice Duquesne, who had mingled sweat with the Germans, who was arrogant about his sophistication, broke the agonizing silence. “How in the name of God could they have done this!”

“Let us just hope,” Dundee said unevenly, “that this Commandant Klaus Stoll was a maniac. Let’s just hope to God there are no more places like this.”

“There couldn’t be! God almighty, there couldn’t be!”

And then the horrible silence fell on them again.

My brothers died for this! What fools ever claimed they knew the Germans! Make the sick well, General Hansen? Sure! Come have a look.

Geoffrey Grimwood rediscovered life first. “We must get on with the job,” he said. “I’ll need all the help I can get. Can you assign me some of your doctors and medics?”

Dundee said he could.

“I’ll have to ask for supplies and advice. I don’t know if anyone knows much about this. Is there any idea how many there are alive in there?”

“Maybe three or four thousand,” Captain Armour said.

“We’ll need a very large place to hold them.”

“How about the castle?”

“No. I’d best have them moved into Rombaden. We’ve got to utilize the facilities of the hospital and Medical College ...”

Sean heard the conversation only in blurs.

“We’d best sort them out and get the dead buried at once. Sean, do you have any objection to putting those captured SS brutes to work on the burial detail? I say, Sean ... we’ve got to bury the dead.”

“The dead will not be buried!” Sean cried.

“Come now, old man. We are all shaken up over this thing. They must be buried at once.”

“No! They will not be buried. Not until every goddamned son of a bitch in Rombaden walks over every inch of this camp.”

“It will take a lot of doing to force them,” Dundee said.

“No one ... no one will be issued a food-ration card until he goes through this camp.”

“It’s six miles to Rombaden. They’ve got a lot of old people and kids. You’re not going to make the kids look at this,” Dundee said.

“Like hell I’m not. They’ll walk like they made the slaves walk every day and every night to the factories. And if they’re too old let them be carried on the backs of their fellow Germans.”

“The children?”

“Their mothers may cover their eyes, but they’ll take the stench of this place to their graves. As for the SS ... Blessing, lock them up in the gas chambers. Let them live in there awhile.”

Sean’s burst had been spent.

“I’m not going to let you do this, Major. We’re buying all kinds of trouble,” Dundee said.

“I take full responsibility.”

“But you’re irrational.”

Sean walked slowly to the colonel and stood nose to nose. “As military governor, my authority supersedes yours, Colonel. If you have a beef, register it with headquarters. If you try and stop me, I’ll have you locked up. Blessing! Find out the colonel’s pleasure!”

Colonel Dandy Dundee, a rough fighter from the ranks, was neither prepared for the ultimatum, the fury of the major, nor the consequences. Everyone about them hung frozen. Dundee broke, turned, and walked away.

“All right, Doc. You said something about needing room?”

“Yes. Although many of them are near the end. We must prepare for a dreadful fatality rate. It would be useless to move some of them out.”

“It is not useless. All of the living will be taken out of here. If they are to die at least they won’t die looking at this goddamned barbed wire. They’ve seen enough of it.” Tears of pain for those poor human animals fell down Sean’s cheeks. “Colonel Dundee. Could you please place your motor transport at my disposal?”

“Yes, Major.”

“Thank you, Colonel. Maurice. Have all German patients removed from the hospital in Rombaden. Commandeer the cathedral. Remove all the benches. Take beds and bedding out of as many German homes as we will need to accommodate these people. But for God’s sake, get them out of this place! Get them out of here!”

O’Toole was ill at ease at the presence of Father Gottfried from the cathedral. The priest wore slightly different garments than American priests, his voice was deep and booming, his face dark, and his eyebrows thick. In fact, he looked very much like a German soldier to O’Toole. In one way he was the enemy, O’Toole reckoned. On the other hand he was a priest and therefore could not be the enemy. It was perplexing and made him nervous. He ushered him into Sean’s office.

“I would have paid my respects earlier,” Father Gottfried said, “but I can understand the urgencies you have been under.”

“What’s on your mind, Father?” Sean asked.

“The requisition of Marienkirche.”

“What about it?”

“I understand it is going to be turned into a hospital.”

“That’s right.”

“Of course I am in great sympathy with those poor souls, but you must try to realize, my son, that the Marienkirche is not only a house of God but a tradition unbroken for centuries that is important to us here ...”

“Father Gottfried,” Sean interrupted, “let’s not horse around with each other. I don’t give a damn for your unbroken traditions or what the people think. As far as you are concerned, if we examine your hands closely we will find Nazi dirt under your fingernails. I am, however, a Catholic and I cannot in the conscience of my faith jail a priest.”

Father Gottfried was hardly prepared for the harsh words. Sean had cut from under him the common bond with which he hoped to appeal and he groped for words.

“Your congregation can pray with the Lutherans. The Lord will forgive them. It is about time a cathedral bearing the name of the Virgin Mother is returned to God’s work.”

“You are no doubt aware,” the priest blurted, “that there exists a concordat signed by the Pope with the German Government over ten years ago.”

“I do not believe that the Catholic Church and the Nazis are compatible. In this district I happen to be more powerful than the Pope.”

“Be careful of what you say!”

“Father Gottfried. I am prepared to answer for my acts in heaven, hell, or purgatory. The Holy Father will have to answer for his.”

“You are no Catholic!”

“And you, sir, are no priest of my church. The men of my church who served God properly have been locked up for five years in Compound A of the Schwabenwald Concentration Camp. You will be at the head of the line with Graf Von Romstein and lead the people of Rombaden to the camp ... and take a good look at the fruits of your fine traditions, Father.”

Chapter Eighteen

THE MARCH MACABRE LASTED for the entire day. The line of grumbling shufflers stretched from the pontoon bridge for six miles along the road to the forest. Graf Ludwig Von Romstein, Baron Sigmund, and Father Gottfried led them. In the opposite direction truckloads of half-dead inmates were raced out of Schwabenwald to the cathedral. The marchers turned their eyes away. At Ludwigsdorf the villagers of the district joined those from Rombaden, and together they walked, the stench growing stronger.

They saw it all. Most of them looked on in silence. Some fainted, some vomited, a few wept. The mothers, indeed, held their hands over the eyes of their children.

And when it was over they clutched their food-ration certificates in sweaty hands and stumbled back to Rombaden.

“I am old. I had nothing to do with it. Why did they make me see it?”

“Hitler brought us to this.”

“It was Hitler’s fault. Hitler and the crazy Nazis.”

“We did not know.”

“Hitler’s fault.”

“We did not know.”

“We did not know.”

“We did not know. How could we know?” asked Herr Himmelfarb, the district recorder.

Sean and Dante Arosa glared at the bureaucrat coldly.

“You must believe me,” he repeated.

“Himmelfarb. How long have you been the Landkreis recorder?”

“Since 1924,” he said proudly. “January 4, 1924.”

Dante lifted a huge ledger and handed it to him. “What is this?”

“Death records of Schwabenwald.”

“They were found in the basement.”

“Ja. I put them there for safekeeping.”

Dante took the ledger back and opened the cover. “This is your handwriting?”

“Ja.”

“Your entries?”

“Ja.”

“Herr Himmelfarb. We have fourteen more ledgers like this one.”

“Thank goodness. I thought they might have been lost.”

“Recording 116,000 death certificates issued from Schawabenwald Concentration Camp.”

“Ja. That would be correct. Fifteen ledgers, 116,000 deaths recorded.”

“Of these, 110,000 are listed as either heart failure or natural causes.”

“Ja.”

“What is meant by ‘natural causes’?”

“I have no idea,” Himmelfarb answered.

“Did it ever occur to you that there was something strange about being handed a thousand death certificates because of heart failure in a given week?”

“I had no thoughts about it one way or the other. My job is merely to see if the certificate is legal and then record it.”

“It never entered your mind that mass murder was being committed?”

“I beg of you, Lieutenant. I am a mere civil servant I do not have opinions. My duty is to keep records and that is all I do. Just keep records.”

“Herr Himmelfarb!” Dante shouted with rising wrath, “were you a member of the Nazi Party?”

“Ja. I was a member. Please remember that my position was nonpolitical. Strictly nonpolitical.”

“You wore a uniform?”

“Ja.”

“With swastikas on it?”

“Ja.”

“You attended Nazi Party meetings?”

“Ja, of course.”

“Nazi rallies?”

“But we all had to attend meetings and rallies. Even on my day off I had to attend whether I wanted to or not.”

“Did you want to?”

“Never!”

“But you did attend them.”

“What choice did I have? Look, Lieutenant, I had very good Jewish friends, even.”

“What happened to them?”

“I don’t know. They disappeared.”

“Did you ever inquire what happened to them?”

“One did not do that.”

“Did you offer them help before they disappeared?”

“It was too dangerous, but I felt very badly when they were taken away.”

“But you were a party member, right?”

“Don’t you understand, Lieutenant? I joined the Nazi Party for only one reason ... to keep my position.”

Dante had reached the boiling point. Sean held up his hand. “Save your breath, Dante. O’Toole!”

The orderly tumbled into the office.

“Lock him up.”

Dante flung up his hands in frustration. “How many have we talked to today? Twenty? Thirty? None of them say, it was my fault. None of them say ... forgive me. ‘I joined the party to save my job.’ ‘I had a good friend who was a Jew.’ ‘Strictly nonpolitical.’ ”

“The Jews are lucky to have so many good German friends,” Sean said. “So there we have it. No one knows anything. Factory foremen who didn’t know they were using slave labor ... people working on the river front who didn’t even see the slaves being marched over every day ... doctors, nurses, professors at the college who didn’t know their colleagues were at the ‘research center’ in the concentration camp ... no one saw the trains coming in to Ludwigsdorf. ... It really never happened.”

“Why did they keep these records?” Dante asked.

“Because, in their warped logic, it is a basis to legalize and justify the murder in Schwabenwald. Of course we will never know how many of those poor people from outside Germany were denied even a death certificate.”

“We did not know,” Count Ludwig said to Sean.

“The record to date is perfect. Twenty-nine people out of twenty-nine interrogated so far did not know. Twenty-two of them had good friends who were Jewish, and twenty-four had nonpolitical Nazi affiliations to hold their jobs.”

“You can not blame us for the work of a single madman. Klaus Stoll was insane, obviously.”

“You might be interested in knowing that Schwabenwald was merely one of many of the same. Here’s a few more names that have just come in. You read English. Read it.” He handed him the paper.

Graf Ludwig read the dispatch from headquarters ... Dachau ... Ravensbruck ... Buchenwald ... reports from the Russian front indicate that in Poland ...

“In God’s name, Major. We are a civilized people.”

“God’s name has been used rather freely in the last few days.”

“You cannot blame an entire nation for the doings of a handful of Nazis.”

Sean grunted a small ironic laugh. There were stacks of files on his desk. He found the one he wanted, opened it, and walked to the count. There were photographs of the City Hall Square of Rombaden in another day. All the buildings—City Hall, the college, hospital, museum, and even the cathedral—were covered with swastika buntings. A long row of brown-shirted SA men stood with tall, thin-tapered torches leading to a grandstand where thousands more in black shirts and death’s head insignias held swastika standards. There were tens of thousands more in Hitler Youth and SS uniforms holding the Nazi salute. And there were thousands more who could not jam into the square listening over loudspeakers in joined barges on the river. It seemed as though not a person could be missing from Rombaden’s population. Some women cried in ecstasy at the sight of the Fuehrer. Blown-up segments of the photographs identified the three Von Romsteins and Father Gottfried and almost all of those other “nonpolitical” Nazis.

All of this had taken place outside the window of Sean’s office, where now the dead from Schwabenwald were being taken out of Marienkirche.

Masses, screaming ecstatic masses. Hear the drums! Hear his voice! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! The trumpets and the marching boots.

“Is that what you call a handful? Is that a handful in the square?”

“These pageants were designed to inflame the lower classes. Masses anywhere in the world are obsessed with uniforms.”

Sean slammed his fist on the table. “But they don’t go insane when they get in a crowd like Germans do!”

“Major, I tell you that Schwabenwald is the work of a few people. You saw for yourself how completely hidden and guarded the place was. It was a word spoken of only in whispers.”

“The smell. Was it smelled in whispers? During the spring and early winter you have south winds. What happened when the smell reached Rombaden? We have twenty-six answers. Ten of them had no opinion about the smell, five thought it was a leather factory, four a fertilizer plant, one a chemical plant, and eleven didn’t smell a thing. What did you think about the smell?”

Ludwig Von Romstein twitched in the first visible sign of discomfort Sean had seen.

“You are chief benefactor of the Medical College and of the Research Center. You entertained those doctors in Castle Romstein. You gambled with them at the Kurhaus. Did they discuss their experiments? Did you know your good money was going for a hundred castrations and ovarectomies a day! From Castle Romstein you can see the village of Ludwigsdorf, is that not correct?”

There was no answer.

“Is that not correct!”

“It is correct.”

“Your servants and your farmers trade and live in Ludwigsdorf. You go to your church in Ludwigsdorf. It is the traditional family church. What did you think when trainloads of open gondola cars passed through Ludwigsdorf filled with corpses? Well, goddammit, what did you think?”

“All of us knew to close our eyes, our ears, and our mouths if we wanted to stay alive.”

“What did you think about your factory being operated by slave labor for six years? They were marched over the bridge every day in front of the whole goddamned city! What did you think?”

“I was told what to manufacture, what my quota was. I took the labor that was assigned to me.”

“You and Hermann Goering were flyers together in the First World War. Did you or did you not use your personal friendship to obtain contracts for airplane motors and V-2 rockets?”

“As a businessman I am no different from any businessman anywhere in using my contacts ...”

“And taking the Nazi Blood Order Honor.”

“I was not in a position to turn down a Nazi decoration. It would have been suicide for me to refuse.”

“So your brother Kurt was used as the Nazi front for the Von Romstein family and conveniently committed suicide.”

“My brother made the decision on his own. I believe your concept of justice excludes guilt by association.”

“Let’s examine the association. Brother number one, mayor. Brother number two, chancellor. Brother number three, Nazi Gauleiter. Let me ask you, Count. In your capacity as chancellor and benefactor what did you do about the smashing of the windows of Jewish shops, the burning of their synagogues, the stealing of their fortunes, beatings in the streets, murder at Schwabenwald?”

Ludwig stiffened and fumed. The Jews! Always the Jews! What did this idiot know about Jews. Yes, as chancellor I kept them from over-running the staff of the hospital and kept their numbers proper in the Medical College. I guarded against their filthy business ethics. Neither he nor his father nor his father’s father ever had a Jew in Castle Romstein. It was a matter of family honor. There were those few distasteful civic occasions when it was unavoidable to meet a Jew ... but, the Jews did not run the theaters and newspapers and banks as they did in Vienna and Berlin.

“I never condoned,” the count said with slow deliberateness, “Hitler’s program for the Jewish question. We Germans had many Jews of whom we were proud. There must have been a dozen German Jewish Nobel Prize winners. A close examination of my tenure in public life will prove I never went outside the law in the treatment of Jews.”

“You didn’t have to go outside the law. The Nuremberg Laws let you do anything you wished. Is there any crime on the books you can’t excuse or justify, Count?”

“It is well and good for you to hammer questions at me and demand explanations,” Von Romstein burst back in anger, “but I was in no more of a position to rule upon either the legality or the inhumanity of the law than you are of your laws. I am a German citizen and these were the laws and times of my country. Surely, the good Major is aware of the existence of unjust laws against the Negroes in America and surely the Major knows that Negroes are looked upon as subhumans by a large segment of the American people. We Germans did not invent race hatred.”

“We Americans did not invent death factories. That is an exclusive German innovation!”

“If ... if we could perhaps discuss this on a sane level. I can neither explain nor justify with you shouting at me and I should like you to know my position.”

Sean’s anger abated slowly. He told himself to gain control. “Go ahead ...”

“May I sit down?”

Sean nodded. The count asked for permission to smoke. He drew a long puff wondering where to begin. The man opposite him was filled with righteous wrath.

“You must remember, Major O’Sullivan,” Von Romstein opened, “that America has never committed acts for which she has had to answer later. Your behavior has never been judged by a conqueror. You have never had to explain. When you are not involved in the day-to-day living and temper of a times it is easy to ask questions as a casual observer.”

“I’m not a casual observer. The Germans have killed two of my brothers.”

“And I have lost a son. I do not wish to offend you, Major, but you must realize that the House of Von Romstein has borne the responsibility of this Landkreis since long before Columbus discovered America.”

Sean was impressed by the opening gambit.

“I am not going to question your intelligence by defending feudalism,” Von Romstein continued, “but it is a system that we inherited because of the limited opportunities of the land. Feudalism, the landowner and the overseer, breeds a type of tradition and family responsibility foreign to American life. As time passed we outgrew an agrarian economy and we were forced to industrialize or perish. You see, Germany was the last power in Europe to become industrial. When my grandfather made the great transition, it was a mere fifty years ago.

“Once the Machine Works was built, Rombaden tripled in size. Under an agrarian economy life was quite simple. The population was such that everyone had enough to eat. Products made in small factories where traditional arts had been practiced for generations, but ... with heavy industry the District of Romstein, as was the case in most of Germany, was simply unable to produce enough food. This set off a cycle of dependence upon manufactured products to trade in order to import food.

“Germany is a small country with an enormous population. We do not have room to explore or expand. We do not have the natural, God-given assets of America. Germany is poor in natural wealth. Its great asset is the energy and ingenuity of the people. Things here must be orderly. Ambitions must be limited. The factory here must produce in order to maintain enough jobs. If the factory closes, Rombaden does not eat. Unlike America, we have no magic food surplus to draw upon.

“I inherited the Romstein family responsibility at the end of the First World War. I shall not debate with you the good or the evil of the Versailles Treaty. The Allies say Germany did not get enough punishment. We Germans felt it was too severe. From a practical standpoint, the Versailles Treaty closed down the Machine Works and we were not permitted to produce. The people of this Landkreis and in all of Germany were hungry and frightened and there was no work.”

Graf Ludwig Von Romstein snuffed out his cigarette. He was immersed in his memories; the sea of his own words had caught him up. He drifted toward the window that looked down on the City Hall Square, that place of so much history.

“Nor will I argue either the good or the bad of the Weimar Republic. It was our first experiment with so-called democracy ... and it failed. It was too weak to achieve the needs of the day.

“So, now that this war is ending you say to me ... how could this have happened? I’ll tell you, Major O’Sullivan. If you were a German citizen of Rombaden in 1924 you would have known. There was starvation and no work. Inflation was so bad a wagonload of marks could not buy a loaf of bread.

“And the worst of it was that we Germans had been stripped of our pride and our dignity. Pride is a German strength and a German weakness. Other people can live without it ... the Chinese ... the Latin Americans ... the Slavs. But a German cannot.” He pointed to his dueling scar. “This is a nonsensical pride to show my courage as a young man. Well, Hitler came and spoke to us of jobs and returning German dignity. In that square below and in other squares he staged his pageantry and a hurt lower class devoured it.

“How did the rest of us feel about this ridiculous man? We were coming to a choice in Romstein Landkreis. We either went with Hitler or to the Communists. There was no strong middle ground in the Weimar Republic. So we tried to make a temporary arrangement with Hitler in order to get people working, recover our senses, beat back the Communists, restore our dignity.

“I say in all candor to you, Major O’Sullivan, that in the days that lie ahead you Americans will discover that we were not wrong about the Communists. They may be your allies now, but you shall learn hard lessons about them.

“In the beginning, Hitler gave us more than he had promised. We had our national pride returned and we were working again. None of the people in my class believed that we could not eventually bring Hitler under control. You know the rest of the story. The tyranny imposed upon the German people was absolute. We were strangled and unable to fight back ...”

Sean heard it all with fascination. Was the Versailles Treaty unfair? Could a Germany which plunged the world into its first bloody global war have expected less? And what about the rest of Europe, which starved and went without jobs and knew blood and sorrow because of German insanity.

And what about the Weimar Republic? Did the German people really want it to work? Did the General Staff and all the Von Romsteins give it a chance? Didn’t they fight it and club it to death?

“I am sorry for what happened at Schwabenwald,” Ludwig said softly. “And when the German people learn about these places they will be sorry too. We did not know.”

“What about London and Rotterdam and Warsaw?” Sean asked. “Are you sorry about these places too? Are you sorry about my brothers, Timothy and Liam O’Sullivan? Did you have tears for the human race you trampled on or did you begin to become sorry when you got your brains knocked out at Stalingrad? And as for knowing. You did not know because you did not want to know.”

Graf Ludwig Von Romstein arose. “I assume the interview is at an end?’’

“Yes.”

He turned to go, then stopped and said with a pleading voice, “What you saw at Schwabenwald could have happened to any people anywhere under the same conditions.”

“But it never has, Count, it never has.”

Chapter Nineteen

LUDWIG VON ROMSTEIN BETRAYED his noble breeding where many Germans did, at the table. His otherwise impeccable manners eroded to gluttony satisfied with rapid shovelings of his spoon, fork, knife, and fingers (between slurps and burps) and a final sucking and picking of the teeth. The nervous rebellion made him hungrier than usual.

Sigmund had been right. The American major was obsessed with the mission of destroying him. Moreover, O’Sullivan’s intelligence and his information and knowledge of Von Romstein history was startling. The interview had failed to be convincing.

From the moment he realized what was happening at Schwabenwald a year ago, he wove stories in his own mind to build arguments to prove he knew nothing about it. So did everyone else. He cursed the stupid Nazi louts. They had left everyone in a fine fix by failing to destroy the gas chambers and crematoriums. Clumsy dogs ... leaving those fields and trainloads of corpses strewn around. Even the latest batch of castrations in the “science center” were shot in bed.

Perhaps, Ludwig thought, I should have joined the plot on Hitler’s life last year. I should have covered myself with some sort of anti-Nazi gesture; smuggled a Jew to Switzerland or something. I had Jew slaves working on the farms. So, what then? I would have been strung up like everyone else involved in the bomb plot.

He convinced himself once more that he had stayed out of the intrigues against Hitler for the sake of preserving the family, but the whole Von Romstein family is tottering! Sigmund is ready to crack apart. He has been in a state of hysteria since the first air raids two years ago. What will happen when they really grill him? If only he had the good grace to put himself away as Kurt did.

Of his two sons, Johann had followed the baron’s steps as a flyer. Johann was dead ... shot down over the English Channel.

The other son, Felix, was a dull, minor bureaucrat in Berlin, without ability to carry on the Von Romstein tradition.

His thoughts turned to his daughter, Marla Frick. Marla was the only real hope the family had. But ... hadn’t she always been the only hope? Johann had been wild and irresponsible ... fast cars, faster airplanes. Johann would have never settled to his family duties even if he had survived.

And the others ... bunglers. Marla was the one real Von Romstein of them all. A true German noblewoman. Count Ludwig had needed someone to modernize the Machine Works. He arranged a marriage between Marla and Wilhelm Frick to lure the brilliant industrial designer away from the Krupp Industries.

The Von Romstein fortunes revolved around the Machine Works. Wilhelm Frick could ensure its continued growth and prosperity ... even turn it into one of the nation’s industrial giants. So what if the marriage was not made in heaven ... Wilhelm was ten years older than Marla ... he kept mistresses at the Spa on the south bank ... he had another in Dusseldorf, where he made trips yearly and she accompanied him to Munich and the Riviera. But ... what the devil, we’ve all had our other women. Ludwig had not shared his wife’s bed for seven years. Even poor Sigmund kept a woman in Rombaden.

The marriage of Marla and Wilhelm had produced the necessary heirs, fortunately two boys. These grandsons would eventually adopt the Von Romstein name and carry the great tradition into the next century.

But dammit, just when the big contracts were rolling in Wilhelm Frick was drafted by Alfred Speer’s ministry to organize industry in the occupied countries. Wilhelm Frick had been captured by the Russians. God only knew when he would be seen again, if ever.

Ludwig left the table, retreated to the study of his late brother, Kurt. The room was still plush, having been spared from the bombings. It was in this room so many many years ago ... how many? Twenty ... twenty years ago that he urged Kurt to join the Nazi Party ... get in on the ground floor ... for the sake of the family. Kurt obeyed. Everyone obeyed Ludwig. It was damned fortunate for us all, Ludwig thought, that Kurt did not allow himself or the records to be taken. The Nazi records showed the close intertwining of the Von Romstein control. It was in this room, too, that Kurt took his life. Poor Kurt. Ludwig selected one of his brother’s pipes, found the last of the tobacco, and sunk into a deep chair waiting for Marla to finish putting the children down. Damned nuisance these days without servants.

Marla was a good sport. She and Wilhelm Frick had a magnificent smaller estate on the south bank. The Americans had commandeered it for those louts of Polish laborers. Slaves, indeed! A decent slave can at least put in a day’s work—the Poles were less than useless. In normal times they could not have held jobs at the Machine Works ... now these pigs live in Marla’s home. God knows what they will do to Castle Romstein.

Marla Frick entered the study and said that the children had fallen asleep. She sat in a straight-backed chair near her father. She was a radical departure from the plump, large-breasted, bread-eating, beer-drinking peasant variety that abounded in Romstein Landkreis. Marla Von Romstein Frick was slim, high cheekboned, immaculately groomed. Her features were too dark and thick to give her true beauty, but her manner offset that. All heads turned at the regal bearing when she entered the casino. She was a magnificent horsewoman with a cold intriguing cruelty that could use a whip on a horse or across a servant’s face. Ludwig’s adoration of her was obvious, and against his better judgment he conceded that she was his favorite. He often wondered why son-in-law Wilhelm found it necessary to stray from the fold.

Marla poured her father tea and cognac. “How did the interview go with the American?”

“Not well, I’m afraid.”

“What do they want from us? Haven’t we suffered enough?”

“War is a foreign substance to them. They have never had to explain to an occupation force ... what a convenient existence. We had a good chance to hold our position ... that is, until they opened Schwabenwald. But now the world will rise in a ground swell of righteous wrath and demand retribution.”

“It was disgusting ... unbearable,” Marla said, “forcing us to walk around in the middle of those corpses as though it were our doing.”

Ludwig set his pipe aside. “The fact is, the family is in a grave crisis. In all likelihood your Uncle Sigmund and I will have to serve prison terms.”

“But whatever on earth for, Father?”

“My pet, justice belongs to the winning side. The winners may judge the losers on any set of rules they wish. You can be assured that the Russians will never be brought to justice for their hideous crimes. Only we Germans must answer.”

“Dear God, what has Hitler brought us to.”

“Marla, I am completely prepared to accept a prison term. You know full well that Felix is incapable of heading the family. We do not know when your husband will be released from Russia, if ever. It is up to you, Marla.”

What a delicious moment! Up to me. Up to me and my sons. Me ... the woman!

“Insofar as politics is concerned,” her father continued, “as a woman you are above suspect. Americans are terribly fair about that sort of thing. You know of course that sufficient funds have been transferred to Switzerland.”

Marla nodded.

“Unless you are driven out you are to stay here and keep up the fight for the estate and the Machine Works.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Marla, the great strength of the Von Romstein family is the willingness of its members to sacrifice for our name. Your Uncle Kurt and your brother Johann have given their lives. Your Uncle Sigmund and I are ready to go to prison. Throughout our history Von Romstein women have cemented invaluable alliances for the sake of the family.”

She knew her marriage was no different. Wilhelm Frick was palatable but never desirable. From time to time she enjoyed him, but those times were seldom and only after long periods of lonely frustration.

In their public life Wilhelm Frick was always proper. The union was important to the family. It had produced the desired heirs. It protected the estates, the castle, and the Machine Works. She had known that this was to be the way of things since she was a little girl. Now was the moment of reward. Her sons alone would keep the name alive and her cunning alone would save the family.

Once she had loved someone. He was a student at the Medical College. It was the only time she remembered her father beating her. She was sixteen. Despite her rigid training, despite the fact she despised those people, she had fallen in love with a boy who was half Jew. The penance, discipline, and training that followed was cruel. There were times, of course, on a holiday away from the family when she was able to indulge in a lover. Secretly she looked for a Jew. Perhaps a Jew could help her recapture that one single moment when she was young and giving.

“Marla,” her father continued, “the Americans are building a case against the family. In a way we are fortunate that legality is an obsession with them. Had the Russians come here we would no doubt all be dead. Their concept of justice is as crude as the Slavic people. With the Americans we stand somewhat of a chance. Much of what finally comes to court will be based on the results of the interrogation by this young officer, Arosa.”

She nodded.

“Having been interrogated by him I am convinced that his thinking can be made flexible. I believe the case could be made much less severe.”

Marla spared only a fleeting thought for her husband somewhere in a Russian prison camp. Certainly, if and when he returned from Russia he would want the Machine Works restored and would endorse the urgency of the situation. Besides that, Marla had been without a man for many months. She was hungry for sex. The young American officer was not without appeal.

“They seem to be quite serious about this nonfraternization, Father.”

Ludwig smiled. “Just so much more of their impractical unworkable schoolboy nonsense. I am quite certain, Marla, that you could be quite convincing to Arosa. In fact, I’d bet a fortune on it.”

Chapter Twenty

IT WAS CURFEW. POLISH slave laborers, liberated from Schwabenwald, staggered over the pontoon bridge to the south bank, where Lieutenant Bolinski had set up a displaced persons center in the spas, hotels, and Kurhaus.

Shenandoah Blessing watched them from his jeep and whistled the tune the Poles sang. The last half dozen of them over the square gathered about the jeep to bum cigarettes. One Pole, who wore a Bavarian hunting hat and leather pants, was not content with merely shaking Blessing’s hand. He threw this arm about the fat policeman and thrice blessed America. After that he began to weep with drunken joy and insisted that Blessing should have his green velour hat with the big bushy feather and the hunting pins. Blessing tolerated this all with endless patience.

“Now come on, fellers. Let’s get over to the south bank. Tomorrow is another day.”

The weeping one kissed Blessing’s apple cheeks. They wove off to the pontoon bridge with a dozen farewells.

Blessing looked around the square for any late arrivals. There were none. He tucked his belly under the steering wheel, then U-turned in the direction of the jail while pondering the immediate problems of setting out night patrols.

The whole Rombaden police force had to be disbanded. So far he could find but a half-dozen whitelisted Germans trustworthy enough to augment his meager crew. There was only one company of American infantry to guard the whole Landkreis, the POW’s, and the interned SS in Schwabenwald. If there was any real trouble, he’d be in a bad fix.

He’d press Major O’Sullivan and Bolinski to let him have a few hundred Poles to put into uniform. Could he trust the Poles with weapons? In his own anger after seeing Schwabenwald, Blessing had beaten up some of the SS when they were taken out of the gas chambers. Sean let them out after three days when they began fainting from hunger, thirst, fright, and suffocation and put them under arrest

He wheeled out of the square into a narrow street His thoughts were halted by the sight of someone sitting atop a brick pile between two bombed-out houses. He pulled up and switched off the motor. An older man just sat and stared vacantly into space.

“Say there, old-timer,” he called, “it’s curfew.”

The man didn’t answer.

“Speaken sie English? Say there. It’s schwartz in the himmel. You got to get to your haus.”

“I speaken sie perfect English!”

“It’s curfew.”

“To hell with curfew, sir!”