Joseph Heller - Closing Time

We had a funny guy named Brooks then, and he started yelling: "Surrounded? How can we be surrounded? We just got here. How could we get here if we're all surrounded?"

It was true, it turned out. The Germans had broken through that forest, and it wasn't so funny.

And the next day we found out, only by being told, that we'd surrendered, all of us, the whole regiment.

How could that be? We were armed, we were there, we were equipped. But someone in back had surrendered us all. We were to lay down our arms in a pile on the ground and just wait to be taken in as prisoners. That made no sense.

"Captain, can we try to get back?" someone called out nervously.

"When I turn my back, I'm no longer in command."

"Which way should we go?"

No one knew the answer to that.

Ten of us piled into a light-duty truck with the two drivers who'd brought us there and we took off. We gassed up at the motor pool, that's how calm things were there. We took extra woolen shawls for the face and the neck, dry socks. We had rifles, carbines, and grenades. Inside my shirt against my heavy army underwear I had cartons of food rations, cigarettes, packets cf Nescafe, sugar, matches, my good old reliable Zippo lighter to help start fires, a couple of candles.

We didn't get far.

We didn't even know where we were going. We headed away on the road we'd come in on and turned left onto a wider road when we hit an intersection, thinking we were heading back west toward our own lines. But then the road veered around and we saw we were going north again. We followed other cars. The snowfall turned thick. We began passing jeeps, staff cars, and trucks that had skidded off into drifts and been left there. Then we came to others that had been battered and burned. Some were still smoking. Windows had been shattered. We saw some with bodies. We heard rifle fire, mortars, machine guns, horns, strange whistles. When our own truck fishtailed off into an embankment, we left it and split up into smaller groups to try to go for it separately on foot.

I sloshed off to one side of the road, over the grade and down into the cover of the other side, slipping and sliding as I trudged along as fast as I could move. Two others came with me. Soon we heard cars, dogs, then voices calling orders in German. We moved apart and hid on the ground. They had no trouble finding us. They came right up to us from out of the whirl of snowflakes and had us at gunpoint before we could even make them out. They were dressed in white uniforms that merged into the background, and everything they carried looked brand-new. While we looked like dog shit, as this guy Vonnegut said when I met up with him in the train station and then later put into a book he wrote, Claire told me, and so did the kids.

They caught all of us, all twelve, and had a few hundred more we joined up with as they moved us along. They herded us onto trucks that drove across a river I later found out was the Rhine and dropped us off at a large railroad terminal, where we sat inside moping until a long troop train of boxcars pulled up to the siding. German soldiers hurried out and swarmed into the trucks and staff cars that were waiting. We saw whole detachments wearing American uniforms with MP bands and white helmets, and we had to wonder what the hell was happening. It was the Battle of the Bulge and they were kicking the shit out of us, but we didn't find that out until half a year later.

We spent three nights and three whole days locked inside the cars of that train. We slept standing up, sitting, squatting, and lying down too when we found the room. We had no toilet paper. They didn't care how we did it. We used helmets. When our handkerchiefs were gone, so was our modesty. It took that long to deliver us to that big prisoner of war camp all the way into Germany, almost to the other side. They had a compound there for British soldiers. We recognized the emblem on the gates of the barbed-wire fence. There was another for the Russians. There was one for other Europeans, from which this old guy named Schweik I met later came from. And now there was one for Americans. Some of the Englishmen I spoke to had been prisoners for over four years. I didn't think I could take that. Then I thought that if they could do it, I could too.

About a week and a half after I got there, that officer I spoke to the first day sent for me by name. He began in German.

"You know German, you say?"

"Jawohl, Herr Kommandant."

"Let me hear,' he continued in English. "Speak only in German."

I spoke a little bit of German, I told him. Not well, I knew, but I understood more.

"How does it happen you know it?"

"Ich lernte es in der Schule."

"Why did you study German?"

"Man musste in der Schule erne andere Sprache lernen."

"Did you all pick German?"

"Nein, Hen Commandant."

"The others?"

"Fast alle studierten Franzosisch oder Spanisch."

"Your accent is atrocious."

"Ich weiss. Ich hatte keine Gelegenheit zu üben."

"Why did you choose German?"

I gambled a smile when I told him I thought I would have a chance to speak it someday.

"You were right, you see," he answered dryly. "I am speaking English to you now because I don't want to waste time. Do you like it here, in the camp?"

"Nein, Herr Kommandant."

"Why don't you?"

I did not know the word for boring, but I knew how to tell him I had nothing to do. "Ich babe nicht genug zu tun bier. Hier sind zu viele Manner die nicht genug Arbeit haben."

"I can propose something better. A work detail in the city of Dresden, which is not very far. Do you think you would prefer that?"

"I think I-"

"In German."

"Jawohl, Herr Kommandant. Entschuldigen Sie."

"You will be safe in Dresden, as safe as here. There is no war industry there and no troops stationed, and it will not be bombed. You will eat a bit better and have work to keep you busy. We are sending a hundred or so. We are permitted to do that. Yes?"

I was nodding. "Ich würde auch gerne gehen."

"You would be useful to interpret. The guards there are not educated. They are old or very young, as you will see. The work is correct too. You will be making a food preparation, mainly for pregnant women. Does it still suit you?"

"Ja, das gefallt mir sehr, Herr Kommandant, wenn es nicht verboten ist."

"It is allowed. But," he said, with a pause and a shrug, to let me know there was some kind of catch, "we can put only privates to work. That is all that is allowed by the rules of the Geneva Convention. We are not permitted to send officers, not even noncommissioned officers. And you are a sergeant. Not even when they volunteer."

"Was kann ich tun?" I asked. "Ich glaube Sie würden nicht mit mir reden, wenn Sie wussten dass ich nicht gehen kann." Why else would he send for me if he didn't know a way around it?

"Herr Kommandant," he reminded.

"Herr Kommandant."

He uncupped a palm on the top of his table and pushed toward me a singleedge razor blade. "If you cut off your sergeant's patch we could deal with you like a common soldier. You will lose nothing, no privileges anywhere, not here, not home. Leave the razor blade there when you go, the sergeant's stripes too, if you do decide to take them off."

Dresden was just about the nicest-looking city I'd ever seen. Of course I hadn't seen many then I'd call real cities. Just Manhattan, and then a few thin slices of London, mainly gin mills and bedrooms. There was a river through the middle, and more churches everywhere than I'd seen in my whole life, with spires and domes and crosses on top. There was an opera house in a big square, and around a statue in another place of a man on a horse with a big rump, rows of tents had been put up to house the refugees who were flooding into the city to get away from the Russians who were pushing ahead in the east. The city was working. Trolley cars ran regularly. Kids went to school. People went to jobs, women and old men. The only guy our age we laid eyes on had the stump of a missing arm pinned up in a sleeve. There were plays in the theaters. A big metal sign advertised Yenidze cigarettes. And after a couple of weeks the posters went up, and I saw that a circus was coming to town.