Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“For God’s sake, there’s nothing I want from you.”

Jaeger thought of his wife and daughters, grateful for this instant to think of them before he died. Then another thought forced him to raise himself on one elbow. “But there is something I can give you.”

“Look, colonel, just go ahead and die” — he thought of Laurel and Baird — “it’s what you wanted, goddamn it. You sent your tank straight up at our cannon...”

Staring up the hill, he listened to the approaching vehicle, louder as it turned off the road toward their gun position. It was an American jeep, and it stopped now near the revetment, and Docker saw an officer climb out and return Trankic’s salute—

“I give you righteousness,” Jaeger broke in. “It’s very useful. We have had it and I know.” His face tightened with pain. “But it is also a very great burden...”

The other members of Section Eight had joined the American officer and Trankic on the rock shelf in front of the revetment. The blackout headlights on the jeep cut pale tunnels through the falling snow and transformed the flakes into a froth of radiance.

The men of the section now stood facing an American officer who leaned against the hood of his jeep, a boot hooked on the bumper and a Browning automatic rifle slung over his shoulder...

“Sergeant, listen to me,” Karl Jaeger was saying.

Docker saw that the German officer’s expression had changed; the smile, fixed against what must have been awful pain, had gone, and as he listened to the voices floating on the winds from the revetment, a frown replaced it... “Since you are probably the last person I will ever talk to, I want you to know this. I am a husband, the father of two small girls. My home is in Dresden.” The words were slurred again but held a sudden intensity. “I haven’t lived what you would call a casual or flexible life. Condemn me if you wish, but at least I’ve lived by the rules.” Jaeger shifted his weight to one elbow and looked up the hill. “By my rules, I have been a good soldier. And for these reasons, I would like to make one last request of you.”

“What?” Docker said, still staring up at the officer and his men.

“I wish to surrender my sidearm to you. We cannot speak of mercy, we can leave that to diplomats. But it would be merciful of you to accept it.”

Docker held out his hand, at the same time trying to isolate and identify the source of his sudden anxiety.

Jaeger barely managed to unsnap the flap of his holster. Play-acting and charades, he thought bitterly; reducing it all to sham and masquerade, destroying whatever dignity battle might have with caperings more fit for a harlequinade than honest war, the trade of kings... And he thought of the bedroom in Dresden, not of the eiderdown on the bed or his love for Hedy, but of the trophies on the dresser that he had won in shooting contests as a cadet...

The officer on the hill was giving commands. “Okay, let’s line up there, men. Forget about Sally Rand freezing her tits out here...”

Jaeger drew his Luger from its holster and extended it butt-first to Docker, his eyes never moving from the officer in the American uniform who stood above them bracketed by the jeep’s headlights.

Something in the intensity of this dying German officer’s expression sounded another warning to Docker—

“That man is out of uniform, sergeant,” Jaeger said abruptly.

And as Waffen SS Captain Walter Brecht unslung his automatic rifle, Docker shouted a warning to his men. But before the first echoes of his voice sounded on the sleeting winds, Jaeger had reversed the Luger and fired three shots up the hill — shots, which struck “Der Henker” in the face and formed a pattern there so compact and tidy it could have been covered by the hand of a child.

The two of them died at almost the same instant — Brecht collapsing at Trankic’s feet, the BAR slipping from his arms... Karl Jaeger alone, finding a unity at last in the darkness that came to him on the slopes of Mont Reynard.

“Sarge, you think I should go down and tell the Bon-nards?”

“Tell them what?”

“About Sonny,” Farrel said. “It seems to me one of us should tell Felice about it.”

“All right, tell Felice. If there’s anything of his she’d like, a snapshot—” He let out his breath. “Make it fast, we still got a gun section here.”

Corporal Schmitzer had wrapped the bodies of Jackson Baird and Sonny Laurel in tarpaulins and taken them to the high ground in the woods and laid them down alongside Gelnick. They had found no radio in the VIII Corps jeep, only maps of the area, GI binoculars, a thermos of cold coffee, a pack of Camel cigarettes... and stenciled under the lining of the driver’s seat — WAFFEN SS CAPTAIN WALTER BRECHT.

On Docker’s orders Linari parked the jeep behind a stand of shrapnel-torn bushes and joined Solvis and Kohler in repositioning and reloading the guns.

After the bodies of Captain Walter Brecht and Colonel Karl Jaeger had been covered, Trankic and Docker walked to the shelf in front of the revetment and looked out over the valley. Trankic uncapped his canteen and offered it to Docker. “Only thing. Bull, there’s nothing fucking much to drink to.”

“What about Christmas?”

“Sure,” Trankic said. “I forgot about that.”

The German officer had said something to Docker before he died, something about war being the trade of kings. Docker wasn’t sure he understood that, and anyway, it all depended where you were when the war was going on.

“So Merry Christmas,” he said.

The two soldiers drank from their canteen cups, the cold metal rims burning their lips, and looked down the slopes of Mont Reynard, where the falling snow turned blue on the smoke rising from the wreckage of the German tank.

February 14, 1945. Liège, Belgium. Wednesday, 0830 Hours.

Liège, capital of the Belgian province of the same name — on the Meuse in the heart of Walloon country — is an industrial center of several hundred thousand inhabitants.

The city (with Antwerp) had been a top priority target for German V-1 and V-2 rockets during the Battle of the Bulge. When that offensive was finally checked and contained, Liège remained a functioning city, although many of its boulevards and buildings had been shattered by months of rocket and artillery fire.

A number of main streets were blocked off to traffic, and the walls of most hotels and office buildings had been shored up with wooden scaffoldings and stacked rows of sandbags. A nighttime blackout was in effect, but the essential activities of Liège continued to flourish; shops and markets opened at dawn and the city’s avenues funneled traffic from the Channel ports toward First Army’s supply depots. The Army’s administrative offices were now being transferred closer to the increasingly stable front but ranking officers were still quartered in a complex of buildings on the outskirts of the city in an area known as Brabant Park.

On a cold, sunny morning, Buell Docker drove into Liège and parked on a crowded street near the Hotel Leopold, a massive gray stone building which had been requisitioned by First Army as a billet and mess for transient officers. The hotel straddled an intersection of avenues near the railway station and central flower markets.

At the reception desk an elderly clerk looked at his orders and directed Docker to a room on the third floor, where a wrought-iron balcony crusted with soot-grained snow gave him a view of river bridges and church steeples.

The room was warm, but the water in the bathroom taps was as cold as if it had been piped over open ground from a freezing river. He showered quickly, standing next to a sputtering radiator to towel himself down, then opened his duffel bag to change into a clean uniform and an Eisenhower jacket with the faded outline of his sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves. The gold bars on the shoulders had been lent by Captain Grant when Docker was commissioned in the field to replace Lieutenant Longworth...