The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (34 page)

This morning he caught a ride twenty miles south of Krefeld to the blasted city of Cologne, once the proudest German metropolis west of the Rhine. Bandy wanted to catch the blackened ruins in the slanting light of sunup. Cologne has been the target of incessant Allied bombings until the only recognizable trace left is the famous cathedral, a marvel of medieval construction or one lucky damn building.

Bandy was tempted to stay down there with the entering First Army. He’s still looking for the right horse to bet on in the race to Berlin. But the First is under Bradley, and Bandy has not forgotten that Ike advised him to stay up here on the northern track with Monty’s Twenty-first.

Like a good handicapper, Bandy has studied the odds, on maps, through chats with officers, and drawing on his own journalistic experience. South of Cologne, there are only a few good points to cross the Rhine. Beyond the river heading east from there, the land is heavily wooded, broken up by narrow valleys and corrugated hills, and sparsely laid with serviceable roads. Not good for offensive battle. The farther south you move, the longer becomes the salient to Berlin, and the less likely any army south of Cologne will make for the capital of the Reich.

In the north, Montgomery enjoys plenty of excellent locations for a river crossing, suitable terrain for mechanized warfare, and a north German plain and
Autobahns
that lead straight into Berlin. In his path are several major Allied objectives, especially the factory-rich Ruhr valley and the V-l andV-2 missile sites in Holland. Most important, Montgomery has Eisenhower’s promise of support and the weight of agreed-upon Allied strategy, that his route is the route to Berlin.

At dawn this morning Bandy was in Cologne. He was impressed with the apocalyptic annihilation, the appalling might of Allied bombers seen from ground level. The bridges over the Rhine there have all been sunk by the retreating Germans. With the sun lifting its head, women of every age began to scratch the streets with brooms made of bound straw. The children cleaned and stacked bricks, shopkeepers cleared room in the rubble for stalls. Bandy is sure he caught life—real and elusive life—sending out green shoots through the ashes. He snapped American soldiers standing bewildered with hands on hips, watching what to them must seem like hapless labor. When he was done he came back to Krefeld and his bread-smelling bunker.

Footfalls descend the bakery steps. Bandy sits up. His watch says it’s after noon. His back is in knots, his neck is kinked. He prefers sleeping on dirt to concrete, but he likes a real roof and walls better than a tent.

A young PRO—Public Relations Officer—steps into the basement. He’s tall and lean. The man’s gait down the steps is angular, all knees and elbows, like a bag of coat hangers.

“Mr. Bandy? Sir, how are you?”

Bandy stands, again in sore phases. He’s getting old for this work.

“Good, good.” He sees the silver bar. “Lieutenant ...”

“Rubin, sir.”

“Rubin.” They shake hands. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

“Just checking in, sir. I’m kind of new on board. I’ve heard a lot about you and wanted to meet face-to-face. See if there was anything I could do for you. We all think you’re doing a bang-up job for the Ninth, sir. We’re sort of stuck up here with Montgomery’s Twenty-first. Most of the American press is down south running along behind Patton and Bradley. So I just wanted to tell you we’re glad you’re with us. Anything I can do, you let me know.”

“Just keep me posted,” Bandy says. His tone is tired. He makes an effort to smile. “I hate to be the last to know something.”

Rubin nods, a brisk tilt to his helmet. Bandy bets he does everything like that, sharp. The frontline boys lose that crisp edge the first time a round whizzes past their ears. The veterans are all rounded off, like old gravestones. Rubin’s okay, but he’s a press boy, not a GI Joe, not exhausted and running on fumes of pride and fear like the fighting men. Some of the guys haven’t been out of action since D-Day. Some of them are hoping for a “million-dollar wound,” the one that doesn’t kill them, just plugs them enough to get a Red Cross ticket Stateside. Bandy will hand nice young Lieutenant Rubin his exposed film to be sent to the censors, he’ll read Rubin’s releases, listen to his briefings, catch a ride with Rubin when he needs one. And that’s it for the tall skinny clean PRO. Bandy doesn’t feel bad about this prejudice. Bandy reads war in faces the way generals read it on maps. There’s brotherhood conferred on the men in Bandy’s photographs, dead and alive.

The kid waits for more conversation; that’s how he fights his war. Bandy gives him a weary look. Rubin begins his retreat.

Bandy is on one knee on the bedroll, scattered rolls of film around him, when Rubin says, “Oh, Mr. Bandy. In keeping with making sure you stay informed, I don’t know if you heard. We got a bridge.”

Bandy straightens as though he has bounced on a diving board.

“What?”

“We got a bridge. Over the Rhine.”

“Where? When did we get it?”

“Well”—the young officer makes a sort of apologetic wringing of his hands—”it’s down in Remagen.”

Remagen. South of Cologne by another thirty miles. It’s smack in the middle of Courtney Hodges’ First Army sector, a nothing little Rhine town between Bonn and Koblenz.

“So it wasn’t really
we
who got it, to be exact. But ...”

Bandy holds up a flat palm. Be quiet. Rubin is about to happily explain that it’s still “we,” technically, the Americans, who got the first bridge.

“When?”

“Two days ago, the seventh. The Krauts tried to blow it up, but it just fired off the pilings and settled right back down. Amazing. Big railroad bridge too, called Ludendorff. Ninth Armored Division was doing some recon and they just came up on this big Rhine bridge. You believe that? I’ll tell you, it’s some breakthrough. I hear First Army already has two whole divisions across the river. You know, March seventh was even Mardi Gras. I bet the brass is throwing a party.”

Rubin’s telling is too chirpy for Bandy, this is rotten news. In fact, Charles Bandy may be the only American in Europe for whom this is rotten news. The images of Mardi Gras masks and confetti are stillborn in Bandy’s head.

He whirls for his helmet and his camera bag. He scoops up film canisters from the floor and stuffs them in pockets. Rubin steps back to give him room to rotate.

Bandy says nothing. When he has enough supplies on him to last a few days, he flashes past the tall kid and takes the bakery steps in a few bounds. He scoots through the wreckage of the bakery shop and finds himself in the ruined street, under a gray and dank sky, before he stops.

Trucks rumble past, towing artillery pieces. Soldiers lug crates and weapons. Bandy stands in the middle of a war noon in Krefeld, on the wrong bank of the Rhine.

He sits on the brick curb. His knees come up high, his pack settles between his ankles.

“Where am I going?” he asks some part of him he hopes might have an answer.

Rubin catches up.

“Mr. Bandy, where’re you going?”

Two weeks. That’s how big a jump First Army has gotten on Montgomery with their miracle bridge down in nowheresville Remagen. Monty’s D-day to jump across the Rhine isn’t until March twenty-fourth.

Two more weeks.

Bandy is frozen between alternatives. His horse looked good early, leading out of the gate. But it’s been overtaken on the first stinking turn by a goddamned fifty-to-one dark horse. Remagen. The Germans blew the bridge up, Mardi Gras fireworks. Why didn’t it fall into the river?

Remagen is right in the heart of Bradley country. General Omar Bradley, commander of Twelfth Army Group, which includes the First. He is Ike’s most favored officer, a classmate at West Point.

Oh, Ike is having himself a laugh over this. A real knee-slapping hoot.

Bandy recalls the disdain with which Eisenhower described his struggles with Montgomery. Every correspondent in the European theater knows how Ike and Monty feel about each other. It’s been an open tug-of-war since the beaches of Normandy, no secret about it. And now that the breakthrough has finally happened, Eisenhower can commit his reserves and surge ahead. Ike’s got a rabbit’s foot, Bandy thinks, Remagen is some kind of wish granted. Bridges are down along every foot of the Rhine, four hundred miles from Holland to Switzerland. And Omar Bradley gets one.

This could shift the weight of the campaign to Bradley’s middle sector, away from the British in the north. If Ike wants to—and Bandy believes he well might—he’s been given the chance to snub Monty, not politically or personally, for which he would justly take a lot of heat, but the right way, for military reasons. The Supreme Commander will be simply exploiting an amazing stroke of good fortune, the result of a farsighted, flexible battle plan.

Should Bandy head for Remagen and hook up with First Army?

Or should he stay put, and figure that Monty still has the inside track?

Bradley will have a big lead. In two weeks, who knows how far he can get? But he has a tougher course ahead of him. And his forces are spread out all over the middle and southern sectors. Berlin was never in Twelfth Army’s sights. Will Bradley and Ike adjust their plans and strike to the northeast?

Montgomery is deliberate, a plodder in this race. But he has the best route, and has the bit in his teeth for nothing short of glory in Berlin.

Soon it will be too late for Bandy to make this choice. Once the two armies light out over the German countryside, after their advances take on the shape of spear thrusts, it’ll be impossible to move from one leading point to another.

Who is going to Berlin? Twelfth Army or Twenty-first Army?

What will Eisenhower do?

Behind him on the sidewalk, Rubin asks again.

“Mr. Bandy, sir. Where are you going?”

~ * ~

March 10, 1945, 0640 hours

Ten kilometers east of the Oder River

Stonsk, Poland

the sound of gunfire never seems to quit in his head.

It’s not his imagination. He hears the guns, whether they’re in the rumble of a passing truck, a stream tumbling down rocks, or the actual report of a weapon somewhere. He wonders often if gunfire isn’t truly the sound of the world and he, in the manner of a doctor with a stethoscope to a patient’s chest, hears the unheard, deep sound, the real clamor of life that is the din of death.

Ilya sleeps the soldier’s sleep. He doesn’t dream, but stays on guard at the outpost to consciousness. He knows he is cold. He knows he is curled on his side in a foxhole he dug a week ago. He knows he is filthy. There it is, the pop of rifles, the chatter like freezing teeth of machine guns. Ilya doesn’t bother to decipher if these are real weapons he hears or the ghosts of gunfire hiding inside something innocent. He is half asleep and they are at least half guns, and that is enough.

A weight like drunkenness lies over his shoulder. He’s not tired anymore, he ought to wake up. The weight doesn’t keep him warm or comfortable but holds him to the ground anyway, making him reluctant to rise. In this straddling state, with eyes and ears in twilight, everything coming from outside him is baffled. He can grapple with his own thoughts.

It’s a cliché to keep seeing the German prisoners in the road. Ilya has been at war since 1942. More than any other object in a man’s world, more than toothbrushes or hammers or ink pens, he has held a gun. He’s seen the blood of almost as many men as he has seen their faces. He would expect to read in a novel about this sort of thing, a soldier haunted by a deed such as the massacre of the German prisoners. Ilya feels pestered because there they are, alive again on the road. Greatcoats and cloth caps. They stumble. They clot in fear under the hurled abuse. He turns his back once more and there it is, the gunfire. This time he’s sure that’s what the sound is.

Ilya wants to be done with whatever this is, guilt or grief, he has no idea; he can’t get a clear look at it, not as clear as the vision of the prisoners alive in their last minutes. But he figures that if he can muster up a healthy dollop of remorse, the scene will go away inside him, or at least join the other images of war as a memory and not a recurrent burr. Maybe when the German prisoners leave they’ll take the constant gunfire with them.