Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

Maybe... and yet Docker still believed, though not so strongly now, that he had at least tried in these hearings to give Baird a last chance to explain himself to his father...

“I won’t press you for an answer,” Major Karsh said. “But I can assure you I would be most interested in whatever response you might care to make. Specifically, to repeat myself, do you think Baird was simply telling you what he thought you wanted to hear?”

Docker shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure, sir.” His voice sounded muted in the drafty ballroom. “I can only give you my opinion, major—”

“Then let’s have that.”

“I felt the best thing Baird had going for him, the only thing, in fact, was to tell the truth. I thought he did. I still do, but I grant you I can’t be absolutely certain—”

When a knock sounded abruptly, the mood in the ballroom was so intense that Sergeant Corey visibly started. The MP corporal swung open the doors, accepted an envelope from an elderly lobby attendant and delivered it to Major Karsh, who opened the envelope and read the note inside it, then strapped on his wrist-watch and began collecting his notes and folders and putting them into his briefcase.

“Gentlemen, we will recess until ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” he said, but as he closed his briefcase, another thought seemed to occur to him and he looked directly at Docker. “Lieutenant, I said at the start of these hearings that I’d conduct them as openly as possible. Therefore, I will tell you that I have just received a confirmation from Lieutenant Whitter that he will be available to give testimony when the hearings reconvene tomorrow morning.”

There was mail at the Hotel Leopold for Docker, two letters someone had brought to his room and left on the bedside table. Since he had left Battery headquarters that morning before mail call. Docker assumed Captain Grant had sent them over to Liège with the supply truck.

One of the letters was from Dave Hamlin, dated February 2nd. There was mention of his commission, and of his father, who in Hamlin’s words looked worn and tired, and something about the German shepherd, Detroit, and coming down with dysentery. The other letter was from Lepont, his name and address written in ink, the script ruler-straight and graceful on the coarsely fibered envelope.

He showered in a thin drizzle of water and shaved before a mirror whose flecked surface reflected the overhead lighting in erratic patterns. As his face emerged with the strokes of the razor, he was puzzled by the bitterness in his expression. Still, it seemed an appropriate match to his cold eyes and the slivers of gray at his temples, the gray he still wasn’t used to... it had come too soon, he hadn’t been gone that long from the walks through the campus and the talks with Hamlin, the tubs of beer at beach parties and the noisy rides to New York in old cars and the long empty Sunday afternoons with his father... Putting on a fresh uniform, he tried to understand his depression. He uncapped his canteen and poured a splash of black whiskey into a glass and stared at his reflection, drinking slowly, feeling a coldness at first and then small explosions of warmth in his stomach. He touched the gold bars of his tunic and wondered what kind of soldier he had really been through all these years, knowing there would probably never be a “real” answer.

At the same café where he’d lunched, Docker now settled at a table in the rear, as far as possible from the GIs along the zinc-topped bar. He ordered a brandy from a white-haired waiter with a towel draped over his jacket. A radio tuned to the armed forces network was playing loud country music.

Docker drank the brandy, which tasted faintly of beets and made him think of the old man they had bought vegetables from a long time ago. He opened Denise Francoeur’s letter while the brandy warmed him and the music drifted through layers of blue cigarette smoke.

Her note was brief, and Docker could imagine her pale face and black hair as he read it. The village was quiet again, she had written, the soldiers gone. She had walked into the woods on a mild afternoon and collected fresh green fir boughs and bunches of holly to put on the mantel and windowsills. The big dog — she didn’t know his name — had run away from the Bonnards. Jocko had seen it at the river one evening and was keeping a watch for it. The boy from his section, Tex Farrel (she had spelled it “Tix”), had come back to Castle Rêve to see Felice Bonnard. The nuns would keep Margret until everything was safe. On sunny afternoons, the snow was melting in the low parts of the hills and the water was collecting in puddles along the river road—

The radio music stopped and the voice of an announcer sounded sharply, silencing the noisy laughter at the bar.

“We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin from Paris. In massive attacks over the past twenty-four hours, British and American bombers have dropped thousands of tons of bombs and incendiaries on the Germany city of Dresden. In one of the heaviest raids ever launched in the European Theatre of Operations, the city has been — according to eyewitness observers — almost completely demolished. Hundreds of fires are raging through the ruins and can be seen from fifty to a hundred miles by the crewmen of approaching aircraft. American Flying Fortresses and British Lancasters have been flying round-the-clock bombing missions over the ancient city, once called by Germans ‘the Paris of the north’...”

The old waiter asked Docker if he wanted another brandy. Docker nodded, but he was hardly aware of the noisy talk resuming at the bar, or the heavy cigarette smoke mingling with the smell of damp boots and sour wine.

He was thinking of the German, Karl Jaeger, the thoughts merging with memories of Denise Francoeur. He had seen her only twice after the clash with Karl Jaeger’s tank, one night in her home and again in the square before the church where she had stood with other villagers waving to the trucks and guns of Section Eight as they wheeled through Lepont on their way west to the bivouac area at Namur. She had told him of Jaeger’s distraught behavior, the angel’s head he had smashed from the camouflaged wall and the photographs of his rosy blond daughters he had put on the pillows of her bed...

“Fire storms have gutted most of the city. Bridges have collapsed into the Elbe River. The population of Dresden has swollen recently to more than one million, every available building crowded by German refugees from the east and an unknown number of American and British prisoners of war. And because of these conditions, it is now estimated that the death toll in Dresden may exceed one hundred and fifty thousand persons—”

After an erratic burst of static, the country music sounded again and the waiter asked Docker if he wanted something to eat; he was going off duty presently but would be pleased to bring the lieutenant a sandwich if he wanted it. Docker asked the old man for another brandy.

He sat in the noisy bar trying to remember what Karl Jaeger had said to him in the last minutes of his life on the torn, rocky slope of Mont Reynard... “I give you righteousness. Condemn me if you wish, but at least I’ve lived by rules. By my rules, I have been a good soldier.”

The village of Lepont and the rooms in her home were places where he had left part of himself, he knew, as he had left something in the other towns of the war, on the roads where there had been faces and weather to remember before they were swept away into the past beyond retrieving.

Still, Denise’s letter had created a sense of a remembered permanence... the melting snow and the holly she had picked for the mantelpiece, he could see that with her eyes, and Jocko, bent and crooked, whistling in the dusk at the river’s edge for their dog... and Tex Farrel walking up the castle road again to see the girl Sonny Laurel had loved there... Docker had thought that when the hearings were over he would return to the battery by way of Lepont, but when he read the last paragraph of Denise’s letter he knew he would never do that, and knew that the village of the Salm was one more place that was gone from him. She had written: