John Katzenbach: Hart’s War

The southerner turned and eyed Tommy.

"Trust me," Trader Vic continued with a small laugh.

"Trouble'll be coming. I can tell. Best to keep folks separated."

He smiled again.

Tommy kept silent.

Bedford brayed.

"Hell, Hart, you know, I'll bet even money that maybe my great-granddaddy took a shot at one of your ancestors once or twice, back in the great war of independence, except that ain't what your damn fool Yankee textbooks call it now, is it? Good thing for you that the

Bedfords never were much in the way of marksmen."

Tommy smiled.

"The Hart family traditionally was always good at ducking," he said.

Bedford burst out laughing.

"Well," he said, "that's a valuable ability. Tommy. Keep that family tree alive for centuries to come."

Still smiling, he stepped away.

"Well, I'm gonna go do my talking with the colonel. You change your mind, come to your senses and wanna make that trade, you know I am definitely open for business twenty-four hours a day, and Sundays, too, because right now I think the good Lord is paying more attention elsewhere, and not watching out for this particular flock of sheep too damn much."

From the playing field, several kriegies started yelling in their direction and waving at Vincent Bedford. One of them waved a bat and ball above his head.

"Well," the Mississippian said, "I guess I'll have to put off talking with the big boss man until this afternoon, 'cause these boys need someone to show them how the great game of baseball is properly played.

Be seem' ya. Hart. You work on changing your mind…"

Tommy watched as Trader Vic trotted toward the field.

From the opposite direction, he heard a distinctly American voice shout out, "Kein drinkwasser!" in half-fractured German. Then he heard the same call answered from a hut a few yards away. The German phrase stood for "not drinking water" and was what the Krauts printed on the steel barrels used for hauling sewage. It was also the standard kriegie early warning for the men in the huts to know that a ferret was walking through the camp in their direction and gave any men involved in escape activities time to hide their work, whether it was digging or forging documents. The ferrets were rarely pleased to be called sewage.

Tommy Hart hurried toward the sound of the voices.

He hoped it was Fritz Number One who'd been spotted lurking around the compound, because he was generally the easiest ferret to bribe. He did not dwell long on what Bedford had said.

It took a half-dozen cigarettes to persuade Fritz Number One to accompany him to the northern compound. The two men marched through the camp gate into the space that separated the two compounds. On one side there was a barracks for guards, and then the commandant's offices. Behind that was a brick-and-mortar coldwater shower block.

Two guards with slung rifles were standing outside, smoking.

From inside the showers. Tommy Hart could hear voices raised in song.

The British were great chorale lovers. Their songs were invariably wildly ribald, dramatically obscene, or fantastically offensive.

He slowed his pace and listened. The men were singing "Cats on the

Roof " and he swiftly recognized the refrain.

"Oh, cats on the roof, cats on the tiles… "Cats with the syphilis and cats with the piles…"

Fritz Number One had also slowed.

"Do the British know any normal songs?" he asked quietly.

"I don't think so," Tommy replied.

The voices bursting from the shower room launched into a song called

"Fuck All of It."

"The commandant," Fritz Number One said softly, "I do not think he enjoys the British singing. He no longer permits his wife and their little daughters to come visit him in his office when the British officers are going to the showers."

"War is hell," Tommy said.

Fritz Number One quickly raised his hand to cover his mouth, as if blocking a cough, but in reality to stifle a laugh.

"We must all do our duty," he said with a hidden cackle, "however we see it."

The two men walked past a gray cinder-block building.

This was the cooler-the punishment barracks-with a dozen windowless and bare cement cells hidden inside.

"Empty now," Fritz Number One said.

They approached the gate to the British compound.

"Three hours. Lieutenant Hart. This is adequate?"

"Three hours. Meet you in the front."

The ferret swung his arm toward a guard, gesturing for the man to push the gate open. Tommy could see Flying Officer Hugh Renaday waiting just beyond the gate and he hurried forward to meet his friend.

"How's the wing commander?" Tommy asked, as the two men walked swiftly through the British compound.

"Phillip? Well, physically, he seems more run down than ever. He can't seem to shake this cold or whatever the bloody hell it is, and the last few nights he's been coughing, a wet, nasty cough, all night long. But in the morning he shrugs it all off and he won't let me take him to the surgeon's. Stubborn old bastard. If he dies here, it'll serve him right."

Renaday spoke with a brusque, flat Canadian accent, words that were as dry and windswept as the vast prairie regions that he called home, but contradictorily tinged with the frequent Anglicism that reflected his years in the R.A.F. The flying officer walked with a lengthy, impatient stride, as if he found the travel between locations to be inconvenient, that what was important to him was where one came from and where one ended up and the distance between really just an irritation. He was wide-shouldered and thickset, muscled even though the camp had stripped pounds from his frame.

He wore his hair longer than most of the men in the camp, as if daring lice and fleas to infest him. None had been so foolhardy as of yet.

"Anyway," Renaday continued, as they turned a corner, passing two British officers diligently raking soil in a small garden, "he's damn glad today's Friday, and that you're visiting.

Can't tell you how much he looks forward to these sessions.

As if by using his brain he defeats how lousy the rest of him feels."

Renaday shook his head and added: "Other men like to talk of home, but Phillip likes to analyze these cases. I think it reminds him of what he was once and what he's likely to be when he gets back to jolly old England. He ought to be sitting in front of a warm fireplace, lecturing a few acolytes in the intricacies of some obscure legal point, wearing silk slippers and a green velvet smoking jacket, sipping from a cup of the finest. Every time I look at the old bastard, I can't imagine what the hell he was thinking when he climbed on board that damnable Blenheim."

Tommy smiled.

"Probably thinking the same thing we all thought."

"And what, my learned American friend, might that have been?"

"That despite the large and near constant volume of incredibly persuasive evidence to the contrary, nothing much bad was going to happen to us."

Renaday burst into a deep, resonant laugh that made some of the gardening officers pick up their heads and pay a brief spot of attention before returning to their well-raked plots of yellow-brown earth.

"God's bitter truth there. Yank."

He shook his head, still smiling, then gestured.

"There's Phillip now."

Wing Commander Phillip Pryce was sitting on the steps to a hut, a book in one hand. He wore a threadbare olive blanket draped across his shoulders despite the warmth, and had his cap pushed back on his head.

His eyeglasses were dropped down on his nose, like a caricature of a teacher, and he chewed on the end of a pencil. He waved like a child at a parade when he spotted the two men striding in his direction.

"Ah, Thomas, Thomas, delighted as always. Have you come prepared?"

"Always prepared. Your Honor," Tommy Hart replied.