Shrapnel (11 page)

Finally, the Russians are pulled out. Some kind of settlement is made between the Soviets and the Americans, where they occupy certain areas and we occupy others. Our outfit winds up in a town called Plauen in what used to be East Germany. There aren't many buildings standing, I don't think there's a pane of glass in the whole town. It's a shambles, absolute rubble.

But this looting and raping starts again. I'm Sergeant of the Guard for about ten men in my squad. These are guys I know. They're in my squad. We eat together, laugh together, are scared together. The Russians are gone, but something appears to have broken down when the Russians were here. The guys start thinking ‘If they can do it, so can we.' It seems the way many people are, they tend
to follow whatever's going on, no matter how bad it might be. Look at boxing, or spectators at football games today, or even basketball, a supposed non-contact sport. It's vicious, violent and everyone is cheering them on.

I can see how what we call the Holocaust happened. It's a weakness in human beings, all human beings, that we must guard against. The herd instinct is strong in most people and they will follow a leader, in almost any insane programme, no matter how inhuman, just because he's the leader and other people are doing it. People who would never think of doing things like burning, gassing people, on their own, find themselves doing what they are told, no matter how cruel, vicious, murderous it might be. And, it's just because
the rest of the people
are doing it.

Look at the French in their revolution, at the Inquisition in Spain, at the pogroms against Jews in Russia, the campaign against the Kulaks, the murders by Mao in China, the white men in America against the Afro-Americans or the indigenous Amerindians. History is filled with these horrible lapses from acceptable human behaviour. Our natural survival systems collapse in our fears. Civilization as we know it fails, the barriers fall,
and the worst aspects in human nature are revealed. The façade of civilization is eliminated.

These are the thoughts that run through my mind. I'm finding it hard to hang on.

We're guarding the weirdest things. For example, someone has come down in a parachute and the parachute is hooked up in a tree. We're guarding the parachute, I guess because the silk is valuable and they don't want it stolen, or maybe it's just to give us something to do, hopefully, hopelessly, to keep us out of trouble.

In the cellars of destroyed buildings are stored all kinds of valuable merchandise. It's supposed to be protected from looting by our own soldiers and the German civilians who are still there. There are no German soldiers. They've been pressed back, are still involved in fighting the Russians and being gathered in by the thousands, as prisoners.

We're guarding a lumber yard. A bunch of valuable seeming stuff in a cellar under rubble is to be guarded by us. But we're spread out pretty thin from post to post. I'm supposed to go around on my tour of guard duty and see that everybody is at their post, not asleep or anything. It's late afternoon, we're doing four on and two off.

I'm out on my rounds. I come to the ones who are guarding a cellar with fancy clothes in it. They
have beautiful silk scarves, I don't think they were made in Germany, I don't know where they were made, and there are no tags on them. But they're paisley type silk scarves so I dump the water out of a ‘liberated' German canteen and just start stuffing those scarves in, tying them one onto the other, like elephants on parade at a circus. I keep stuffing them in. I manage to stuff about seventy scarves into a single canteen, then screw the top on. I have my own canteen for water. This canteen, with the scarves, I put in my duffel bag. I actually get these home to my mother, sister and girlfriend. For years thereafter they have absolutely gorgeous silk scarves. My excuse is, it's German loot. We're allowed to take things like canteens and such stuff as souvenirs of war and ship them home. But, I also ship home a German camouflage jacket and a dress sword I'd taken from a German officer, and the scarves.

It's easy to lose respect for yourself but that's what war does, maybe that's what it's supposed to do. I'm following the herd, ‘If they can do it, so can I.'

I go over to these two GIs who are supposedly on guard. They have a couple of women down in the cellar under all the rubble and are doing the obvious with great glee. I'm pissed.

‘Get these women out of there, you two. I'm going to tour the rounds one more time and when I come back they'd better be gone.'

I'm really playing Sergeant, somebody has to. I go back to where the GIs who are not on guard are hanging out under the parachute. It's the most comfortable of the guard posts. There's a little overhang left on one building, so we can duck under it if it rains.

‘Pete, I'm going out to check if those guys really did get rid of those women.'

After a while I walk back over and the guys are carrying out my orders, but slowly, very slowly. The women have gotten dressed and are just coming out. They need to come up out of a slanted cellar door type thing. It's heavy, it isn't just made of wood, it's steel. The whole cellar might have been some kind of bomb shelter.

So the women go through the gate out onto the street, afraid of me. They start running.

And who should come rolling down the street? Who would believe it? It's the General of our whole division, a man named General Collier. With him is his son who is a Major, also his adjutant, a classic case of nepotism. It means he gets to stay with Daddy all the time. There's a lot of resentment within the officers of our division about this
particular arrangement. General Collier is quite an old man – maybe he wasn't – but he seemed old to me then. Even for a division commander, he's old.

They stop the jeep and the General sends his son over to find out what's going on and why these two women are running away from the post.

Just then, the GIs, who
should
be on the post, come tearing out. They're dressed, but they don't have their helmets on, and they don't have their rifles. In other words, by military standards, they're semi-dressed.

Wow, what a set-up for a court martial! Here we go again. It happens to be a time when everyone is getting all upset with ideas of ‘fraternisation'. By this, they generally mean getting close to the German women. In England, they showed us movies about German Frauleins who are shown dancing to accordion music, dressed in long skirts and skimpy blouses pushing their boobs up. Later, these same German women are shown stabbing GIs in the back or passing on information, or poisoning GIs in their coffee or beer. The movies were almost as bad as the VD films they showed us in boot camp. We all had a big laugh and the officer in charge kept stopping the film and hollering at us.

Fraternising must have been happening everywhere. The trouble is, right now they're looking for a good case of fraternisation to build up a court martial and scare everybody. We look like just the kind of example they're searching for, but, at first, they seem to let it go by.

When I get those two jerks back to the home guard post I
really
play Sergeant and give them hell. I tell them they're getting as bad as the Russians. I mean it and I believe it.

But, we are
actually
all reamed out, notes are taken. There is going to be a court martial about this after all. The Sergeant of the Guard, that's me, and these two guys are hauled in and put under guard. We can't go anywhere. We're confined to quarters. The quarters are not very impressive; we're in a mouldy cellar.

A summary court martial is set up and we hang around. They send us a lawyer who's supposed to defend us. He's a Lieutenant and is scared to death of Collier. Major Collier, the son, is going to be a witness and sort of prosecutor. I'm too young and ignorant of the dangers to be concerned enough about a really serious military court martial. I don't know what's really going on, but we decide we don't want this Lieutenant defending us, he's going to do more harm than good, so
we don't tell him anything. But we work out a plan.

They decide not to court martial me. I was Sergeant of the Guard, I saw it all and so I'm to be a witness. The guys in trouble work out a scenario with me. We say I'd just been there less than an hour before and there were no women on this post. It's very hot down there in the cellar and that's why they didn't have their helmets and field jackets on. I'm there because I'm manning the cellar door while they're down doing an inspection of the post. It's a very flimsy kind of excuse but we work out a couple of tricks. We know the Major's not very smart.

For the court martial, there's to be a bird colonel on the court. They're all big brass. They've taken a building that isn't in too bad shape, cleaned it out, and are using it as a sort of courtroom. They have a long table with chairs for all the officers. The deposition is made by Major Collier as to what he has seen and he is straight, trying to say exactly what happened. The officer in charge, the Colonel, calls our assigned Lieutenant to have him speak and he does just what we expected he would do. He repeats almost exactly what Major Collier says, agreeing with him, even though he saw nothing. At the same time, he's making excuses
for us, in terms of ‘what these men have been through' and so on.

I'm called to testify. It isn't a regular civil trial. There are only two witnesses; me and Major Collier. I ask if I can question Major Collier. The Colonel nods his head.

‘Major Collier, were the gates open, closed, or partially open when you arrived?'

He says, ‘They were completely open.'

I say, ‘There were no gates.' And there weren't.

I get him to admit he's hardly seen the women. I tell how they were a mother and her little girl looking for fire wood and the men on guard had just chased them off when the General arrived.

Now, the court martial board is against Major Collier because of his relationship to his father. After we'd gone through several of these little scenarios, where it becomes obvious Collier hadn't really seen anything, he's well befuddled. The Colonel in charge of the court martial stands up, scraping his chair against the wooden floor as he does so.

‘It seems to me, Gentlemen of the court, the evidence for this court martial is not sufficient and has not been properly gathered.'

He looks around at everyone at the table, they all nod their heads. Then, just like that, we're
dismissed. Well, the poor Major who was hoping to get his oak leaf, doesn't, and our guys are exonerated. We go out and have a really big K ration celebration afterwards.

When I first came back to K Company, I'd been assigned as a scout to the second platoon, I guess because I'd been in I&R. I'm assigned along with a new replacement, named Rolin Clairmont. Since we're the two new arrivals, we're tent mates, as if we ever got to sleep in tents instead of wet holes.

We get to know each other reasonably well. He's tall, at least six three and comes from Bordertown, New York. Before the army, he worked with his father taking hunters into upper New York State and even up into Maine to hunt. Most times they'd fly in. Rolin and his father live on a lake in New York State and they have a plane with pontoons. Rolin has been flying planes illegally since he was thirteen or fourteen years old
and knows a lot about them. He also knows a lot about shooting and hunting.

He makes a good tent/hole mate. Most of the people in K Company are from the South, but he turns out to be better than the southerners at being southern. He's had much experience with rifles, hunting of all kinds, from deer and bear, to small game hunting; squirrels, rabbits. He also knows how to build a still, and he can speak French. He tells me he speaks Canadian French. We're not that far into Germany and most of the civilians speak French or German, or both. It's an intermediate, no-man's kind of land.

There's an interesting thing about border zones, in Europe, anyway. They always seem to be much more sleazy, run down, compared to the rest. It's almost as if everything stops moving and working right around the border. This is the kind of area we're in, and putting the war on top of that, it's quite shabby.

When Rolin comes up to K Company, we're in battalion reserve. But two days later we're moved on to Neuendorf, replacing L Company. It's been medium hard according to them, they're going back, and of course they exaggerate, telling us how awful it is and trying to scare us. They say things like, ‘You'll be sorry', or ‘Take a last
look at the world' – all those kinds of usual things.

It's after midnight when we move into the line, so we're slipping and stumbling around, going into holes that are already dug and mucked up. We're two hours on and four off, but when you're off four, you're not really in comfort; you're in another hole, which is dug up against a wall. However, that hole feels like practically going home compared to the outpost hole Rolin and I are sharing guard on. Our hole is the farthest forward, closest to the Germans. It's maybe forty to a hundred yards out from the hole against the wall.

We're out there and we rotate with each other three or four times. Nothing's really happening. I'll never know how the army decides when to move and when not to move. Luckily, in the part of the world we're in, we are neither in attack nor in retreat. I imagine it's a question of getting supplies up or somebody making up his mind.

Then when we charge out and do an attack, we'll settle down to wait again, right after. It's a strange kind of business. It changes later but this is the way it is then. We're taking a bit of territory, then consolidating, taking a bit more, consolidating again.

Rolin and I are out in our hole. It's a pretty good spot right at the edge of the forest looking down a long hill with a stream at the bottom, and then the hill goes up the other side and there's another forest edge over there. That's about four or five hundred yards away. We know the Germans are in the forest. We don't know exactly where, we try to keep an eye out for them but they aren't about to reveal their positions and we aren't going to reveal ours either. We just assume they know where we are but aren't doing anything any more than we are.

We're always careful, we don't stick our heads up and we don't rustle around and make noise. It's a good position to change guard because we have cover almost all the way to the hole and then there's a slight drop going toward the forest. I imagine that's why they dug it here.

Anyway, when we change guard, we come in and the other guys go out, hardly exchanging a word unless something important has happened, and hardly anything has, generally. After that, we'll sit a while to see if any Germans have seen us make the change. Again, it's sort of like ‘hide and seek'. Rolin and I are out there a little over an hour into a four hour guard. Night guards are two. Suddenly two German soldiers come out of
nowhere, walking right across in front of us. We figure they must be lost or crazy. They come out of the forest on the other side, walking down the hill. They're strolling along the stream with their guns on their shoulders as if there's no war going on at all. We both immediately lift our rifles and release the safeties.

I'm waiting to see Rolin's hunting skills when it comes to real combat. It's a terrible thing to say, but you don't want to take any unnecessary chances. The proper, warlike, military thing to do is to shoot these two guys and duck down, hoping nobody saw you shoot.

It's as bad as that, but that's the way it is. You're not going to shout and stand up yelling, ‘Give up. We've got you covered.' You're not about to go down that hill and chase them either. You're just going to shoot them and duck down as fast as possible. Also, you're not going to let them just go by, this is the enemy after all. The sad thing is, we have an obligation to do our part. They're just making the kind of mistake I could easily make myself. I have a rotten sense of direction.

After a minute, it looks to me as if they're sort of coming toward us at a diagonal. They come down to the stream, a small stream, find some rocks and cross it. They must be really lost. They're
going at a slow pace with their rifles still slung on their shoulders but they're getting closer and closer.

I'm thinking, ‘Boy this guy Clairmont really is a hunter, he never fires until he's ready.' He keeps looking over at me and I keep looking at him. I can see he's getting more and more nervous. I am too. I swear they aren't more than fifty yards away and we can hear them talking.

He turns to me and whispers, ‘Would you give a fire order, please?'

I realise he's thinking he's on a rifle range. You aren't allowed to fire on a rifle range unless you have a firing order.

‘For Christ's sake Rolin, open up, Fire!' I yell.

Clairmont takes the front one, and I take the back one. They go down twisting and squirming, then are still. We duck down and wait to see what's going to happen. Maybe there are other Germans and they'll start shooting, but all is quiet

Well, I'll never know to this day why those two Germans were strolling around as if there was no war going on. The thing I remember most is the control Clairmont had standing there, waiting for a firing order. It was a premonition of things to come.