Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Twenty-Five

December 23, 1944. Lepont, Belgium. Saturday, 0600 Hours.

Colonel Jaeger stood in the square of Lepont and watched the first early light breaking above the stone bridges, coating the frozen surface of the river the color of steel. He looked at his wristwatch and then at the passageway beside the café, La Chance, where he could see two of his corporals, the faint light breaking on their MP-40 machine guns.

The Americans and their sergeant had fifteen minutes left...

Jaeger began pacing, his strides smooth and rhythmic. Nothing in his bearing revealed his awareness of the eyes watching him from the houses facing on the square. The silent vacuum he moved in was disturbed only by the winds against the church and the crunch of his boots on the snow-encrusted cobblestones.

A knot of anxiety was winding tight in his chest. Anger suddenly made him light-headed.

He had arranged with the priest to use the church cellar as a guardhouse for the Americans until they could be trucked to a camp behind the German lines. His corporals were present only to carry out these details. After that, his crew would conclude their primary mission, finding and eliminating any trace of the ME-262 before the weather broke and Allied planes on reconnaissance flights might spot it.

Except Sergeant Ebert had reported by radio that the American soldiers gave no evidence of surrendering; instead they were strengthening their line along the sheer edge of the cliff, emplacing machine guns on both flanks of their cannon revetment. They had test-fired these guns within the last hour, and Jaeger had listened to the flat, whistling echoes and had seen the faraway streams of tracer ammunition arching through the darkness high above the valley. Showing off like stupid children...

His orders had been to destroy the Americans, not to take them prisoner, and he couldn’t conceive, wouldn’t conceive, that the sergeant was refusing to accept the almost comradely terms he’d proposed on his own authority and for which he undoubtedly would have to accept serious consequences... To distract himself Jaeger thought of his family in Dresden: Hedy and his daughters, forcing himself to recall the exact texture of spring days when he walked with them through parks and along the banks of the river. He remembered shops where they bought chocolate and hot spice cakes and the way the birds hopped about, and blue and white horses that Hannah and Rosa loved to ride on the merry-go-round, their fair hair blown about their faces, rosy in the fresh winds which — when he was a child — his father had told him were broken and gentled by the Aeolian spires of Dresden’s old cathedrals... He thought of those carefree days when the war was only a promise of future vindication, when he and Rudi Geldman explored the silent woods and swam in clear lakes and read together at the fireplace in his father’s apartment...

He looked at his watch and saw the Americans’ time was running out, and he knew that his corporals were watching him and the people of the village were watching him.

But those generations of unborn Germans that General Kroll fancied as the moral custodians of some distant future, they were not watching him, he was alone as he tried to decide who would live and who would die near a frozen village on the banks of the Salm River. Morality existed on the cracked edge of the present, not in the past or future. What he and the sergeant decided to do today was what was — or wasn’t — moral; what unborn generations might think about it would be history.

Jaeger’s anger had grown so that he felt helpless to deflect or control it, but it also seemed a cleansing emotion... Rudi had said that when reason slept, the beast in the blood awakened, and Rudi had believed, with deep sorrow, that reason had gone to sleep in Germany... Jaeger looked at his watch one last time, but there was no mistake, no optical illusion, he had not misread the hands or the numerals — the sergeant had declined his offer of a moral solution to their problem, a humane surrender.

Alerting his men, he told them to return immediately to the tank position, but as he swung himself behind the wheel of his command car he was seized by a sensation that intensified so powerfully he felt it might break his mind into pieces... his thoughts searing and painful... of Rudi and a child the priest had told him about... the accusing eye that glared at him from his father’s ravaged face... Almost with a will of its own his hand moved to the seat beside him and touched the cold metal clasps of his leather field case. They had expected him somehow to right the wrongs of the world, wrongs they couldn’t even give a clear name to. The American soldiers on the hill didn’t deserve to die, and neither had Rudi Geldman, but if he could never make amends for any of this, if in truth he had not been allowed to, then he didn’t deserve — as a soldier and father — the burden his own father had willed him, the letter and pictures the old man had placed in his field case on their last meeting in the tiny bedroom in Dresden, the last pictures taken of Rudi Geldman at Buchenwald... In his heart Jaeger couldn’t believe he deserved a guilt and remorse that was beyond human responsibility, that sublimated all action to an acceptance of forces outside a man’s control — the Will of God, or Fate, or whatever that possessive, malevolent thing was in the ancient stars.

Drawing a deep breath of the chill air to clear his head, Jaeger took the letter and pictures from his field case and studied them with deliberate attention under the faint yellow cone of his dashboard light.