The Major's Daughter (2 page)

He raised his eyebrows in appraisal, his fork stalled halfway to his mouth. What choice did they have, anyway? she wondered. At times she felt they had all been swept out to sea. The editorials back and forth in the
Boston Post
, or the
Littleton Courier
, seemed like so much tedious bloviating. The war had entered every facet of their lives, and despite the editorialists' most cherished hopes, it would not rest until it found its own equilibrium.

Three short pops from the fireplace suddenly silenced the table. Faces looked quickly around, startled. A man nearest the fireplace stood and stepped on a few errant sparks, his handkerchief still in his shirt collar.

“Thought the Germans had arrived!” one man quipped.

And that brought laughter, though Collie thought, as she laughed with them, that the laughter had an underside of nervous fear. The enemy at last was to be made visible, and fear and curiosity divided most people's expectations, and not one of them, she felt, knew clearly what hopes they had in their hearts.

 • • • 

On the walk to Camp Stark from the village the sky clouded over and a few heavy drops of rain began to fall. It always astonished Collie how fast the weather could change in New Hampshire. Outside of Fort Dix, New Jersey, the place that Collie called home, the weather changed slowly and more predictably. In New Hampshire the winds coming across the Canadian plains made every weather system fiercer and more dramatic. It made it difficult to know how to dress in the morning; she found she relied on several layers of outerwear, peeling them or adding them as the day gained focus.

Collie might have hitched a ride from the many trucks going back and forth from the village to the camp proper, but she liked the walk and promised it to herself each morning. She had found a path, an angler's path, she supposed, that took her along the banks of the Ammonoosuc River. She had discovered a large oak about halfway to the camp, and beneath the oak a square slab of granite formed a perfect bench. It appeared almost as if someone had placed it there intentionally, but such a notion was not in keeping with the rough quality of life in a logging village. In any event, she had found it a place of contemplation, and she often stopped with whatever book she might be reading to spend a few minutes away from the noisy boardinghouse or the clamor of camp construction. Whatever else the war might be, it was a loud affair, Collie thought. Life among men brought sounds she had forgotten in her time at Smith. Boots stamping, keys rattling against doors, the yawn of chairs as the men plopped into them, the greedy knock of their knives and forks against whatever plate passed near them—she had written to Estelle about these sounds, marveling that the men seemed not to notice their own cacophony. The only remedy for it, she declared, was the slab of granite next to the lovely river and a page or two of poetry to keep her level.

She felt guilty this morning, however, at the idea of stopping because of the arriving Germans. Her father needed her. Besides, the rain hurried her along. She heard the sounds of hammers before she saw the camp. The hammer blows echoed across the river and bounced off the Percy Mountains, the sharp break of the hammering rhythm cut and squeezed by the rush of water over rock. The camp had been built across from an old orchard, and Collie spotted the four guard towers slapped together quickly once the final decision had been made in Washington. Inside the fence, nine barracks stood in rows; they would be used to house the Germans. One hundred and fifty men, she knew, would make this their home. The refectory and latrines took up either side of the compound. It was not a perfect arrangement by any means, but, as her father said, the Germans were prisoners, not guests, and they would receive fair treatment, not a holiday.

This morning, however, the camp looked particularly dismal in the dull rain. The hammer blows came from a detail of men working to build a three-sided pole barn for the twitch horses. The horses would be required for logging, Collie knew, and she had helped process the procurement forms herself. Even now two large animals stood close to where the men worked, their heads down from the rain, their massive hindquarters slick with water.

Collie said good morning to the two guards at the central gate, then entered the small administration building on the right side. A potbelly stove gave off a solid wave of heat as she shucked out of her coat; she was grateful for the warmth because the walk had given her a chill.

Lieutenant Peters came out of her father's office carrying a stenographer's pad and a stack of invoices. Collie shared the outside office with him. He was a tall man, birdlike, with a diffident manner. He reminded Collie of a hen working sideways at a new spot of grass, his attention ready to dart elsewhere at a moment's notice. But he was devoted to her father, she knew, and he had been deluged with paperwork concerning the German POWs. He had done his best, but the army wanted everything in triplicate, so much so that it occasionally threatened to tie the office in knots. Lieutenant Peters managed it all with good humor, and Collie appreciated his forbearance.

“Morning, Collie,” he said as he put his paperwork on his desk. “Today's the day.”

“Are they on time?”

“From all reports. They've left Fort Devens. Hope you're ready with your German.”

“Hardly,” Collie said, blushing slightly at the thought that she, with her smattering of knowledge inspired primarily by her mother's love of German opera and lieder singing, would be counted on to communicate with the Germans. Surely, she thought not for the first time, the army could provide better interpreters, but she knew, also, that many had been commandeered for overseas work. It made her nervous to contemplate the potential embarrassment her rudimentary German might bring. Still, in a world of blind men, the one-eyed man is king, as her father said. She promised to do her best.

She settled into the morning's work. There was plenty to occupy her. She helped Lieutenant Peters with requisitions forms, answered the endlessly ringing telephone—the press, in particular, could not be satisfied and wanted more and more details about even the smallest details of the arrangements—and did her best to buffer her father from relentless questions. A barrage of men showed up to ask for clarifications: what planking to use for the boardwalks between the barracks and the latrines; what should be paid for hay; what food should be served the first night. The questions betrayed nervousness. Despite everything that had been said, the camp reminded Collie of a theater on opening night. The months of preparation suddenly ended; in a single moment the camp would go from being a proposal debated in a thousand forums to a tiny town populated by one hundred and fifty Germans. Everyone, Collie realized, felt keyed up and jumpy.

At noon her father came out of his office. It was time to go to the train station.

“Are you ready?” he asked her. “Lieutenant Peters, please keep an eye on things.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Off we go,” her father said.

“Yes,” she said simply, and gathered her coat.

The rain had lightened, but the sun still struggled to free itself from the clouds.

“I've been thinking of your mother this morning,” her father said when they had climbed into the jeep that would whisk them to the village. “She would have enjoyed this day. She always liked a fuss. She loved parades and circuses, and she knew very well that I didn't. But she made me go just the same. She claimed it was good for me. It made my heart lighter, she said.”

“I've been thinking of her, too. I'm worried that her German was much better than mine.”

“Oh, I don't know if that's true. She never took a class. She learned it by ear, through music mostly. You received instruction at Smith, so I don't imagine you need to take a backseat to her ability. It's true she had a knack for languages, but you got that from her.”

“You're about to see how little she passed along to me.”

“You'll do fine. I have every confidence in you.”

He smiled and patted her knee. He leaned to one side and drew his handkerchief from his hip pocket and pressed it to his lips. She heard his lungs rasp; he sat very still when that happened, as if to move might encourage his lungs to fail in their efforts to take in oxygen.

They arrived at the train station a moment later. A crowd of fifty or so waited in the rain, all of them peering east toward Berlin. It was a great irony, Collie knew, that the nearest town to Camp Stark was named Berlin. Everyone laughed at the odd coincidence. Meanwhile, two boys knelt near the rails, their ears pressed to the metal, their faces expressing equal measures of hope and excitement. Now and then they raised up to shake their heads at the crowd, then bent back down, listening to the rails for vibrations that passed through the earth.

Chapter Two

G
erman prisoner-of-war Private August Wahrlich still felt the sea in his legs. That was not possible, of course, and yet it felt true. He imagined his legs contained water in sympathy with the sea, and that the rocking train reminded his body of its passage over the ocean to America. It was a nonsensical notion, but he was a young man given to poetic ideas and entertaining metaphors, and he deliberately gave his mind license to chase the thoughts it encountered for as long as it liked.

Some in the company called him dreamy or a rag catcher, he knew, but he did not mind. He understood the men's reactions came from his status as a former university student. One fellow soldier from Africa named Lingenheimer had called him Hamlet, after the equivocating prince of Denmark. The name had not entirely stuck, the reference being too obscure, but its residue remained, and his role as a translator of German to English calcified it. For better or worse, among the men he was known as a man of education, an impractical man, a man not as fully committed to German victory as his heartier compatriots. Whether his reputation was deserved or not no longer mattered. Men in wartime lived as semaphore messages, brief outlines that conveyed only the most cursory understanding of one another.

As his mind chased these thoughts, August kept his eyes outward, watching the passing scenery. Occasionally he caught his reflection in the dull glass window, and he would be surprised, again, to find it there. The steady swaying of the train made him see the reflection as though it were a puppet head rolling out beyond the tracks, and that thought, curious as it was, made him smile. He wondered, absently, if his mind had always been given to such odd flights of fancy, or whether the war had pushed him to give his imagination a wider leash. He could not say for certain, but he did not mind living inside his thoughts. Better, certainly, than the gruff exchanges of the men around him, the laughing brays of men confined too long in one place.

The more rational part of his mind took pleasure in the scenery. He had volunteered for service in New Hampshire; it had been advertised as a woodland, not unlike his homeland near Vienna, and he had been one of the first to sign up. Despite his compatriots' worries that they might be tricked into dire conditions, he had taken a chance. Some men, he knew, had been sent to potato farms in Houlton, Maine, while others preferred the dull monotony of prison life at Fort Devens. August had chosen the forest over the potato field, the scent of pine over the raw earth of farming. He had spent his boyhood in the forests, and now, gazing out the window, he saw the pines as old friends returned to him after months and months of fighting in the deserts of North Africa. It did his heart good to see them.

“We're coming into it,” a man said behind him. “The train is starting to slow.”

August let his thoughts continue to roam, while around him men became more animated. What were they coming into, after all? No one knew for certain; even the American guards did not know what to expect. Most of the guards would return to Massachusetts, to Fort Devens, on the return train. Though they talked about New Hampshire as a beautiful place, the guards let it be known that Camp Stark was rural and isolated. They had little interest in remaining, and they joked that the Germans better be prepared to speak French with the Quebecois. The idea of the Germans suddenly trapped in a small village appealed to their sense of humor, though August did not exactly understand why. It was one of many things that confused him about Americans.

Suddenly a large water tank came into view; it was a loading tank for trains, August imagined. Then he watched a band of boys running beside the train, some of them shooting imaginary guns at them. The sight of the boys made August look away. At the same moment one of the guards at the front of the car told the men to remain seated, because a few of them had begun to stand and move, preparing to disembark. The guard looked at August, and August stood, as he had done a thousand times in the last months, and repeated the command to his fellow soldiers in German.

“Stay seated!” August said in German.

“I'm sick of sitting,” someone said at the back of the car.

“Tell them we're hungry,” someone else said. “Tell them to feed us.”

“Stay seated!” August repeated.

The train pulled into a tiny village. August was not sure why, but somehow his mind had tricked him to believe they might be met by celebration. Train arrivals often brought joy, but he glimpsed the serious faces on the civilians, the sharp attention of the military personnel, and knew he had been wildly mistaken. He had to remind himself that he was a prisoner of war, that this train brought only obligation, and that the village had been at war with his homeland.

“Wait while we see that everything is in order,” the guard at the front of the car said. August stood and relayed the information to his fellow prisoners. They scarcely heard him. They were too busy looking out at the tiny village and ogling the women who had come to see their arrival.

A few new guards suddenly appeared on the train. They spoke quickly to the regular guards, then together they announced in loud voices that the men would dismount the train and form columns. No foolishness would be tolerated. They must leave by the front of the car and go directly into formation. August served as translator.

How peculiar it all was, August thought as he moved slowly behind the men in front of him toward the exit of the car. Life never ceased surprising one. It had not been so long ago when he had been on a different train heading for the transport boats to take him to Africa. How proud they had been, and so sure of their victory! Now the men in front of him looked like wraiths. Bright letters—PW—had been stitched onto their uniforms, front and back, so there could be no mistake about their status. Their eyes looked tired and beaten, and the color of their skin was ashen. Some of the men had worried that they were being sent to their deaths, and they glanced repeatedly out the windows, trying to assess the situation. For his part, August had stopped hoping for any specific outcome. It was better to be a kite and let the wind do what it wanted with you.

“The circus has come to town! See how they look at us!” someone from farther up in the car said.

“Silence,” a guard said.

Someone cursed, and then, with one large, final step, August found himself on New Hampshire soil. He had a brief impression of faces, curious, anxious faces surrounding him. The citizens remained well back; a dozen or more guards stood with rifles at the ready, their chests puffed up like barnyard roosters. The same pack of boys he had seen earlier dodged in and out of the crowd, trying to get a better view. A few women regarded the Germans from the train platform, but August did not get a good look at them. Everything was commotion. As soon as the last prisoner had disembarked, the guards began forming them into tighter columns. They had not quite finished the formation when a man—an American, August guessed from his English—began yelling in a frenzied voice.

The guards stiffened. Someone, another American, went to the man and tried to quiet him. Gradually the man's words became clear: the Germans had killed his son, and he called them vile names and cursed them to hell. Around August his fellow prisoners whispered, asking what the man was saying. August could not distinguish all the words, but he whispered quickly the general sense. Someone in a low voice cursed back, calling the American father a shit-hound.

Then they marched. The guards flanked them all around while the prisoners marched past the length of the train. August felt the damp cold and tried to duck more deeply into his outer garment. His legs felt tired and filled with sand. At last, however, he smelled pine. The scent arrived on the quiet breeze, enhanced by the dampness, and August filled his lungs over and over again. It was the fragrance of his homeland, and he recalled his boyhood and let his mind roam to those early days, and he followed the man in front of him, his senses whisking him away, the rain falling in the river and making circles that drifted wider and wider until they returned once more to simple water.

 • • • 

The sight of the Germans marching peacefully toward Camp Stark filled Major Brennan with rancorous thoughts. Twice he touched his handkerchief to his lips, his breath coming in short, openmouthed pants, his eyes locked on the well-ordered columns. It was typical of the Germans to march well even in captivity. That aspect of the Germans he had always admired; as a lifelong military man he could not do otherwise. And yet hadn't the Allies given everything in the Great War to prevent exactly this? To keep Germans away from these shores? The sight of the German men marching in heavy cadence, their round, Teutonic faces straight forward despite their desire to see their surroundings, impressed him forcefully. He could not hate them, though he nevertheless despised them. They had robbed the air from his lungs, burned his pulmonary tract with gas, and yet, like some great, malignant wild creature, they did not intend it personally. A lion, after all, does not want to hurt you; it merely wants to consume you. That, Major Brennan felt, represented the German attitude.

Watching them, he also assessed their vitality and usefulness, despairing that the men would not be sufficient.
Blood from stones
, that was the common description given by his fellow camp commandants when asked about the usefulness of the Germans. He had read the reports: the Germans resented imprisonment, obviously, but they also betrayed a degree of haughtiness that was unusual in a captured people. It was as if, he had read, the Germans did not quite believe their country had been weakened. For many German prisoners the reports of German defeat remained a fabric of lies. Yes, they might be captured themselves, but the Fatherland, and certainly Hitler himself, fought on bravely and probably victoriously.

Major Brennan's job, however, was simple:
one cord per man per day.
The quota had been agreed upon by Sherman Heights, the president of the Brown Paper Company in Berlin, and by the regional commandant, General Lewis. Whether it was feasible was a different question altogether, and as Major Brennan rode behind the marching Germans with his daughter beside him, he had grave misgivings. They looked to be a skinny, ragtag outfit. Workingmen required calories, five thousand per day at least for the kind of work these men would undertake, but such nutritional theory felt laughable in the face of the emaciated men. Clearly they had suffered. It was evident in their postures, in the nervous eyes they cast about them. They were not loggers. They were German soldiers stripped of their pride, men left with only the vestiges of their wartime stature.

“What do you think of them?” Major Brennan asked his daughter, because he needed to be out of his own thoughts and because he trusted his daughter's powers of observation. “Do they look as you imagined them to look?”

“Less fierce,” Collie answered. “They appear exhausted.”

“They've had a rest at Fort Devens, but I agree. It will be a trick to get work out of them.”

“When is Mr. Heights coming to see them?”

“Tomorrow. He was detained in Berlin.”

“They need to be fed up a little. Look at that one there. He's as thin as a rail.”

“I thought the same thing.”

“Will you put them to work tomorrow?”

“They'll require a day to settle in. We need to find a few leaders among them. And we'll need to poll them to see if any of the men know the work. I doubt it, but it's worth checking. They'll learn the routine tomorrow.”

“It will all work out, Papa.”

Major Brennan nodded. At the same moment a vehicle—a converted Coca-Cola delivery truck carrying a few members of the press—pulled up behind them. The press members had been at the arrival; now they clearly wanted photographs of the men plodding toward the camp. Major Brennan watched them direct the military driver to bring them into position beside the column of marching Germans. The reporters hung out of the wide passenger door and snapped their pictures. The photographs, Major Brennan imagined, would jump onto the AP wire and be across the region before morning. It was not every day one hundred and fifty Germans arrived in a New Hampshire logging town.