David Healey - Red Sniper

“I wish I could say the time passes quickly, but that would be a lie.” They talked for a while, with the POWs eager for any news from the war. Once Whitlock had filled them in, Ramsey clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, now that we’ve got you settled in, get some rest.”

Whitlock wouldn’t have believed it was possible, but as soon as he stretched out on the bunk with his tattered blanket, he fell fast asleep.

Ramsey’s question about how Whitlock was feeling proved to be prophetic. By the next morning, he was shaking with fever. It had been a long time since Whitlock was sick, and the flu or whatever it was hit him like a windshield hitting a bug. His throat burned. His bones ached. He felt miserable.

Fever made him dizzy. When he got up to relieve himself, he staggered drunkenly. The room spun. He could barely keep any food down. Ramsey nursed him through it. He sat him up in the bunk and fed him spoonfuls of watery cabbage soup. He could barely gag down more than a few sips. Whitlock felt embarrassed to be so helpless, but Ramsey was having none of it.

“You’re not the first one,” Ramsey explained. “I’m no doctor, but I’ve got this theory that sometimes the shock of going through being shot down amplifies whatever illness you’ve got. Your immune system is a ninety-eight pound weakling right now, getting sand kicked in its face.”

“And you’re supposed to be Charles Atlas?”

Ramsey snorted. “It used to be that the Germans would put a guy in the infirmary if he got this sick, but there’s not so much as a nurse or an aspirin there anymore. All the medical staff and supplies are at the front. So it’s up to me, good ol’ Nurse Ramsey.”

Ramsey arranged for Whitlock to sleep closer to the stove, which struggled to heat the barracks. He brought Whitlock an extra blanket, and that helped with the shivering. At some point he became delirious, shouting warnings that the Germans were about to march down Main Street during the Fourth of July parade.

Two nights later, Whitlock woke up, knowing at once that he was better. The fever was gone. The room no longer spun, but he felt weak as a kitten. Ramsey was sitting almost within reach on a crate pulled up next to the stove. He brought Whitlock a mug of warm water, since there wasn’t anything resembling tea.

“You’re awake,” Ramsey said. “Goddamn, but you had it bad. I wasn’t sure you were going to pull through.”

“I guess I was out of it for a couple of days.”

“Yeah, you were.The good news is t hat it looks like you’re going to live. The bad news is that you’re still a prisoner in the Hotel Hitler, and the war is still going on.” Ramsey grinned. “Feeling better now?”

Even as the war ended in fitful gasps, winter seemed to cling to the land in those early days of spring. Leaden skies overhung the brown landscape. The air still held an icy chill, no matter what the calendar said.

Vaccaro developed a cold that he couldn’t seem to shake. He sneezed and coughed so much that if they had still been facing German snipers on a regular basis, it would have been one sneeze too many.

Cole offered to shoot him to put him out of his misery.

“Fortunately, I know you’re just kidding, Hillbilly,” Vaccaro said, swiping at his nose with a grayish hankie that he had found somewhere in Belgium.

“If you was back home, my ma would dose you with a big spoonful of whiskey and kerosene.”

“Jesus, it’s a wonder you survived.”

“I reckon there is some truth in the remedy being worse than the sickness.” Cole studied Vaccaro with those unsettling eyes of his.

Crazy eyes , Vaccaro thought of them—just not out loud. He sneezed.

“You know what you need, Vaccaro? You need about two weeks in some sunshine with nothin’ to do.”

“Sounds about right,” Vaccaro said wistfully.

“Ain’t gonna happen, though,” Cole said. He handed Vaccaro a flask of some unidentifiable booze that they had liberated from one of the towns en route to Berlin. “Try some of this. It’s the next best thing.”

Vaccaro took a drink and grimaced. “What is this? Paint thinner?”

“Could be, for all I know.”

Vaccaro took another swig. “Well, if it is paint thinner, at least it will put me out of my misery.”

“That’s the spirit. Have another drink.”

Vaccaro did.

Cole and Vaccaro, along with the bulk of American forces, had washed up against the southern shore of the Elbe River, roughly thirty miles from Berlin. And there they all sat. Hostilities with the Germans had effectively ended. All that the Germans seemed to want to do was to get away from the Russians. One might have thought that what remained of Germany was being invaded by demons, not the Soviet army. Entire families could be seen fleeing with everything they owned on their backs and a glint of fear in their eyes. The Germans were eager to put as much distance between themselves and the Russians as possible.

Maybe the Germans had good reason to be afraid. Rumors had reached the GIs of atrocities being committed by the Russians. Wholesale looting. Murder. The rape of any female they could find. By comparison, the Americans looked like saints.

Vaccaro gazed across the river. “It’s a cryin’ shame that we won’t be going all the way to Berlin.”

“That’s the brass for you. Just like Ellie Mae Smith used to do to me out back of the county fair. She got you all worked up, and then she told you to put it back in your pants.”

“This Ellie Mae, did she have two legs or four?” That set Vaccaro to laughing, which fizzled out into a coughing fit.

“Keep it up, Vaccaro. With any luck, you’ll laugh yourself to death.”

The fact that the Americans were not rushing toward Berlin was a source of keen disappointment, not to mention more than a little confusion. Berlin had been the Allies’ Holy Grail since the D-Day landing. Now that they were so close, that grail had been snatched away.

Just days ago, Eisenhower had an encounter with one of his generals, making an offhand remark that the troops should push on to Berlin. After months spent fighting their way across Europe, there wasn’t a soldier who didn’t want to get to the German capital. Ike’s words had seemed like encouragement.

Then the Supreme Allied commander had reversed his orders, so that all forward motion had come to a grinding halt for reasons that nobody could see. The rumor was that it had everything to do with the Russians—and a simple desire to save American lives. Berlin had no real strategic value, but was more of a symbolic goal. Most of German territory was under Allied control west of the Elbe. If the diehard Nazis wanted to make a last stand in Berlin, it might cost a lot of lives—but to what end? Better to let the Russians fight it out and take the losses. That also meant they would get all the glory.

It had been ingrained in the GIs to see the Germans as enemies, but that perception faded at the sight of the desperate women and children and middle-aged fathers—along with more than a few men who had likely been German soldiers until very recently, but had returned home to help their families escape ahead of the Russian hordes. Another uncomfortable fact was that the Germans looked so much like the Americans themselves. Hardly a man could watch a German family struggling along with small children and a few possessions, without thinking of his own family back home.

Cole and Vaccaro found themselves stationed near the twisted ruins of a railroad bridge spanning the Elbe at a town called Tangermunde. The SS had blown up the bridge in an attempt to slow the American advance toward Berlin. As it turned out, politics had done a better job of that than TNT. Much of the bridge still stood, knitted together by twisted irons rails and girders. The tangled wreckage dipped down into the water in places. Crossing it was so precarious that a knot of refugees had formed on the other bank, uncertain of their chances. A few strong swimmers took directly to the turbulent water, while others were attempting to build makeshift rafts.