Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Eighteen

December 21, 1944. Lepont-sur-Salm. Thursday, 1700 Hours.

When the knock sounded, Denise Francoeur hastily collected the picture books from the floor and gave them to the child, who held them tightly as the schoolteacher pulled back the partition concealing the cellar stairway.

When Margret had disappeared into the dusk of the cellar, Denise smoothed her skirt and opened the front door to a tall American soldier whose face was shadowed by his helmet.

“Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “My name is Docker, Sergeant Docker.”

“Can I help you?”

“Monsieur Bonnard told us you buried a German paratrooper a couple of nights ago and that you have his ID.” She looked puzzled. “His papers. I’d like to see them. I can speak some French if it would help.”

“No, please come in. My English is quite well.” She closed the door quickly against the winds. “Only... it’s rusty, there was no one to...” She paused again. “... to practice with for some time.”

“I’m sure your German is better,” he said.

Her sense of irony and other subtleties had been blunted by five years of war; she did not know whether the American was being rude or simply stating a fact. He noticed her reaction and said, “Bonnard told me you were the schoolteacher so I assumed you’d know languages.”

“I’ll get the papers,” she said. “He also had a gun. Would you want that, too?”

“Yes,” Docker said, glancing at the worn rug with its design of vines and peacocks, at straight-backed chairs near the fireplace, a sewing basket on the floor with a darning egg resting on a frayed blouse.

One wall had been constructed oddly, he thought, in three jointed sections, the middle one decorated with a carved and brightly painted angel’s head.

A small log fire burned in the grate. On the mantelpiece stood a cut-glass bowl heaped with pinecones. Docker looked at himself in a clouded mirror above the mantel, surprised at the gray in his temples, silver now in the candlelight, and surprised too by the lines of weary tension in his features. He was listening to artillery fire from the direction of St. Vith when she came back with a wallet and a bolstered handgun, which she gave to him.

“Would you like some coffee? We make it from roasted barley but it’s hot.”

“Don’t go to any trouble.”

“No, it’s on the stove.”

In the dining room adjoining the parlor, Docker sat at a pine table, bare except for ajar holding dry oak leaves.

The gun was a .25-caliber automatic with ivory hand-grips and small diamond-shaped decorations framing black swastikas. There was a round of ammunition in the chamber and seven more in the cartridge clip. Docker ejected the bullet and put the gun on safe. Papers from the cracked black leather wallet gave him the name and rank and age of the dead German paratrooper: Willi Bremer, Feldwebel, twenty-three. There were several pictures of girls, a pay book, a scapular medal in tissue paper and newspaper clippings of soccer matches in the Stadtswald in Frankfurt am Main. None of these fragments told Docker what he had hoped to find out, which was whether the dead German in a GI uniform had been part of a strike force infiltrating the area or simply a lone flier who happened to bail out of a damaged aircraft above Mont Reynard.

“We took these from his uniform.” She handed him a pair of lapel insignia shaped like tiny silver lightning bolts, the jagged SS of the Schutzstaffel.

“Is his the only body you’ve found? Or that you’ve heard about?”

“The only one, sergeant.”

“Are there any strangers in the village, people you don’t know or haven’t seen before?”

“No.”

Docker fingered the silver SS runes and watched the candlelight glinting on them.

“I’ll get the coffee,” she said.

Docker put his canteen and cigarettes on the table, watching her as she poured coffee into pewter mugs. She was thin and pale with long black hair held back at her temples with tortoiseshell combs. When she brought him coffee, he put a splash of whiskey in it.

“Would you like some? It’s homemade but not bad.”

She nodded and Docker added whiskey to her mug. She looked at the backs of her hands and moved her fingertips slowly over the planks of the old table.

“Did Monsieur Bonnard tell you about my brother?”

“Only that he’d been shot, ma’am, with other hostages.”

“I’d like to tell you something else about him.” She pushed a strand of hair from her forehead and looked about her, a puzzled frown on her face, as if for a moment she’d forgot where she was. “When you call me ‘ma’am,’ it makes me feel quite formal, like I’m in the classroom. I’m twenty-six. You may call me Denise, if you wish. I haven’t talked to anyone for such a long time. My husband was taken almost four years ago and since the hostages were shot, there’s not even my brother.”

“What did you want to tell me about him?”

“Everything,” she said... “How he let me watch him shave when I was young. How we sang together at the holidays— No, I don’t mean that. I wanted to tell you that the Germans shot them right here, in the square in front of the church, you can see where the bullets broke the stones below the little statue of the Virgin... Did Bonnard tell you my brother had a daughter?”

“He said your brother married a Jewish girl and they had a daughter named Margret,” Docker said, and sipped the coffee, bitter with Trankic’s whiskey.

“My brother, Edmond, got Margret out of Cologne after Crystal Night. He crossed the border through the forest. When he was able to return, his wife and her family were gone. They had been taken away. Edmond left Margret with relatives in Verviers, a large family where she could go unnoticed.”

Docker lit a cigarette and watched the smoke in the candlelight. “And is that what you wanted to tell me, ma’am?”

Docker saw that her hands had tightened into small fists, the knuckles white against the table’s dark pine boards.

“Did you know about Crystal Night in America?”

“I imagine some people did.” Docker thought of Gel-nick, his mouth straining wide, bleating in surprise as he dropped to the ground, crying out when rockets and shrapnel tore open his body. Why was he surprised? Why in hell was Gelnick surprised?

“Did you, sergeant?”

“What’s that, ma’am?”

“Did you read about Crystal Night?”

“Yes, it was in November, I think. Five or six years ago. A German official was killed in Paris by a young Jew. There were reprisals in Germany.”

“Yes, you have it right. It was a night of looting and burning. Synagogues and Jewish shops and homes were broken into and burned to the ground. They smashed windows all over Germany and so the announcers on the German radio called it Kristallnacht.”

She watched him as he poured another splash of whiskey into his coffee. His bland expression made her angry. “As you surmised, I speak quite good German.”

“If they come back, that should be useful,” he said.

He heard her intake of breath. “They will come back?”

“I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know if you’re telling the truth and I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t,” he said. “Either way, it’s none of my business. But it’s the usual civilian story when the enemy troops leave. Everybody hated them, everybody fought in the underground. Nobody ever drank with them or slept with them. They blew up trains, and prayed to the Virgin for the Yanks to arrive with chewing gum and chocolate to play Santa Glaus.”

Docker picked up the silver SS runes, juggled them in the palm of his hand, then put them back on the table. “You buried young Willi Bremer, kept his wallet and the pictures of his girlfriends, even saved his gun and goddamn SS insignia. If the Germans come back, you’ve got a nice story for them, and a well-tended grave of one of their finest.”

“Yes, we need a story like that,” she said. “We have nothing else.”

“And you’ve got another story for the Yanks, the resistance movement, reprisals, even a little Jewish refugee.”

Again he heard her soft intake of breath. “Bonnard told you... that Margret is in this house?”

“Yes, he told us that, ma’am. Would you like another drink?”

“No, thank you, I’ve had enough. Probably more than enough.” She looked at him, a deep weariness in her face. “At first I didn’t understand, when you said you thought I would be fluent in German,” she said. “But you thought I’d slept with so many I learned the language thoroughly, even all those impossible verbs.”

“I told you, it’s not my business.”

“I can’t tell you I didn’t have anything to do with Germans... after all, I was raped twice. But rape, I found out, is subject to interpretation. And Father Juneau didn’t agree with my interpretation. He wouldn’t give me absolution because he said it was my duty as a Catholic woman to struggle until I was unconscious, until I could no longer know or feel what was being done to me. To submit while conscious is a willingness, a mortal sin. The first time they were common soldiers and when I fought they put my head in a rain barrel until I choked. The second man was a captain. He was older and had been in the cavalry and his legs were so strong that when he clamped his knees around me I felt my back would break—”

“There’s no reason to tell me this,” he said.

She shook her head and lit one of his cigarettes. “It’s quite easy, it’s not difficult at all. Those men I had never seen before, I have learned to face what they thought of me. But if my husband comes back, can I expect him to think me unchanged? Will he want to know why I didn’t let them drown me? Or why I’m not a cripple like Jocko with my back broken?”

Docker heard a sound behind him and turned quickly. A child stood in the doorway, and he realized he had seen her once before, only then she’d been bundled up in sweaters and a red scarf so that only her dark eyes were visible. Now she wore a blue cotton dress, black woolen stockings and a small white bow in her hair. She came slowly into the dining room and laid a coloring book on the table beside the dried oak leaves, then moved closer to the schoolteacher, putting her dark head against her skirt. In his careful French, Docker asked if she remembered him, but the girl shook her head.

“Not even the chocolate?” Docker said.

“You must think chocolate is the greatest luxury in the world,” Denise Francoeur said. “It’s the second time you’ve talked about it. But the true luxury is anger, sergeant, and maybe that’s what the people who have lied to you can’t afford.”

The child picked up Docker’s mug of coffee, but he took it from her before she could drink from it. She looked anxiously at her aunt when he lifted her onto his knee, but after a moment she opened her book and pointed to a page where she had drawn pictures of small birds in flight, each wing made with a single curving stroke of a crayon.

The room was warm and quiet, silence broken only by the click of sleet on the windows and distant artillery fire. The child soon lost interest in the pictures and put her head against Docker’s shoulder. In a moment or so her faint breathing joined with the sounds of weather and the crack of logs in the fireplace.

“I’ll take her downstairs,” Denise Francoeur said.

“She sleeps there all night?”

“Yes, she has a cot with blankets. I go down often to see that she’s all right.” She took the child from him and went into the parlor where she turned and said, “Good night, sergeant.”

Docker pulled back a blackout curtain and stared out across a field that was dark except where the winds had swept snow into white banks against a hedge of thorn bushes, then watched the filmy texture of the fogs breaking close against the windowpanes.

He poured an inch of Trankic’s whiskey into his coffee mug and sipped it slowly. Was she right about anger? His father savored an anger, choleric in intensity, at the present political administration in the United States. But was that a luxury? Or high frustration? Dave Hamlin’s anger was pretty goddamn luxurious, to be able to stay out of a war and still feel qualified to criticize the manners of those caught up in it. But was Gelnick’s anger a luxury, or simply a burden that got him killed...

He turned and saw Denise Francoeur watching him from the doorway.

“Why did you stay?”

“I’m not sure.” He finished the coffee and put the mug down beside the German automatic. “Well, I unloaded this gun and I thought I’d better show you how to reload it.” He picked up the gun and pulled the receiver back to its maximum extension. When he released it, the receiver snapped forward and drove a round into the chamber. He pointed to the safe-fire lever. “When you move that to the red dot beside the trigger guard, the gun’s ready to fire.”

“And that’s why you stayed? To explain about the gun?”

“No, I stayed because I’m sorry about what I said. I was angry and I wanted to get rid of it.”

“There’s no reason to—”

“No, listen. A man in my section was killed yesterday. His name was Gelnick. He got the same survival kit the army gives everybody — stay alert, keep your rifle clean, don’t get trench foot, don’t get clapped-up, get behind something when they’re firing at you... but he didn’t pay attention. Maybe he didn’t want to, or just couldn’t.” Docker took a sip of Trankic’s whiskey. “You understand any of that?”

“No,” she said. “You’re talking too fast.”

“Well, it’s not important. But I was angry at what happened.”

“And I must say something too. It isn’t what my husband may think that frightens me, it’s what I think of myself.” The words came in a rush and there was a sudden, warm color in her cheeks. “I want to say this but I can’t if you look at me. Do you understand? Please sit down. But look at your coffee or the floor, please.”

Docker stared down at the candlelight glinting on the rim of the coffee mug. “What is it?”

“I hated those Germans, not just with my feelings, but with my body. I don’t want to bring that hatred to my husband. Ever since it happened, I don’t like looking at myself. I can’t help hating what they hated. And they must have hated me to hurt me so terribly. I thought if I could be with someone who didn’t force me or hurt me...” She swallowed, and the sound of it was dry in the warm room. “I watched you with Margret... I was happy for her, and I envied her. She seemed comfortable with you. Do you have children?”

“No, I’m not married.”

“This is very selfish, and very difficult. I thought I could say these things to a stranger quickly and without feeling anything. I’m not speaking of love or kindness, just to be with someone without contempt and pain... then it might be different for me...”

He looked up and saw tears.

“It might be enough,” she said.

But it wouldn’t be enough. Docker knew. The warmth of impersonal flesh wasn’t enough, even though that was the kind of ersatz caring the war had taught them... His arms felt empty without the child, but war gave them all substitutes. His father had his dogs, Schmitzer an ache for the dead, Larkin oblivion in a bottle, and Gelnick the final kind... She hoped to exorcise the memory of rape with the therapy of flesh that was, at best, not angry or cruel or hateful. He knew his own needs weren’t quite that simple... the warmth of the child in his arms had been a rebuke to the loss of caring he regretted but had no defense against. It was the signature of their times perhaps, and it was Count Ciano, Mussolini’s own son-in-law, who had added a flourish to this cynical indifference by describing the children blown to death in an Ethiopian landscape as putting him in mind of flowers, providing improbable but brilliant colors in the smoke and flames of destruction.

But the plus was... if there was ever a plus to war... it could at least make you feel there was something worth risking yourself for. In some way the trust of it brought you closer to strangers than to people you’d spent a lifetime with. Here he could feel closer and more important to this sad young woman and her dead brother Edmond than to names and faces he could remember from a campus in America, and the broken stones of her church were somehow more significant to him now than the skyline of his native city.

“You’re a Catholic,” he said. “Isn’t that important?”

“Yes, but I’m not sure how much. Father Juneau wants to survive. In fairness, he wants us all to survive. He says we’re helpless, there’s no valor in fighting, only foolishness. Even if that’s true, I can’t say my brother was foolish. We’ll all be dead someday. If we don’t take the chance now, we never will. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes, I think it is.”

“Then this is true. I believe it can be different for me. If we have hope, it’s only logical to have faith. Margret fell asleep because you were holding her, and whether it was an illusion or not, whether you cared or not didn’t matter because she believed you did.”

“All right,” he said. “But don’t tell me anything about him. Not a word, not even his name—”

“It’s Etienne,” she said softly.

Docker waited in the dining room until she called him, then put out his cigarette and went into her small, cold bedroom, where a fragrance of dried flowers mingled on the air with the smoke from a snuffed-out candle.

Entering the church choir loft by a narrow, spiral staircase. Jocko and Corporal Trankic removed panels from the back of the organ and Trankic, on his hands and knees, with Jocko training a flashlight over his shoulder, worked almost two hours locating and repairing the transmitter’s malfunctions. After re-soldering the wires to their connections, he and Jocko spent another half hour fine-tuning the equipment. They sent signals in French and English from the La Chance transmitter, but as Trankic began to repeat the grid coordinates of the German plane’s position, he was interrupted by an incoming message.

Jocko held up his hand and leaned closer to the speaker, hearing over an eruption of static Paul Coutreau calling La Chance from Stavelot. Coutreau repeated his warning twice, telling them what his son Simon had seen in the woods near Lepont, his voice low and tense, a straining metallic whisper in the cold silence of the church.