The Devil's Chosen: A Search for Understanding

By Robert W. Barker

"Faster, faster come the German shouts. Louder and more impatient. Into the ravine they run. 'Schnell! Schnell!' No time to think. No time to escape. Fear chokes their hearts. Breathing comes quick and shallow. No place to hide. No place to go but down the bank, down into nature's quiet embrace, open to greet them, open to enfold them."

The brutality and terror of the Holocaust is chillingly brought back to life in this series of fictional accounts from author Robert Barker. SS officer Hans Grber, the sometimes confused and troubled perpetrator, acts as our guide by connecting the scenes in the different stories.

With a focus on the stark, personal decisions made by the perpetrators and victims alike, The Devil's Chosen raises disturbing and enduring questions. Do we summon the bravery to stand against evil, or do we abandon all to save ourselves? Do we have the right and the power to forgive the silent bystanders as well as those responsible? What is our role?

The Devil's Chosen brings the actions and decisions of both the victims and the perpetrators into focus against the unforgiving background of terror and death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 21, 2005
• ISBN: 9780595794041

Robert W. Barker

Robert W. Barker worked as an international explorer for gold in some of the most remote corners of five continents. He has worked with people of many different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, in locations that tourists rarely attempt to visit. His exposure to many different countries and different world environments brings solid authenticity to his descriptions of the locations and characters in his writing. He is the author of The Devil’s Chosen, an examination of the decision processes of the Holocaust and the winner of the Eric Hoffer Award. He has also authored Nuclear Rogue, the first in the series of Peter Binder and Maria Davidoff thrillers. He currently lives in western Massachusetts.

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The Devil’s Chosen

A Search for Understanding

Robert W. Barker

Image311.JPG

The Devil’s Chosen

A Search for Understanding

Copyright © 2005 Robert W. Barker.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-0-5953-4660-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-0-5957-9404-1 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 02/29/2016

Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1 History and Heritage

CHAPTER 2 Betrayal and Blame

CHAPTER 3 Anarchy and Anger

CHAPTER 4 The First of the Innocents

CHAPTER 5 Broken Glass and Fractured Lives

CHAPTER 6 Hope and Desperation

CHAPTER 7 Helpless Hands

CHAPTER 8 Bonds of Love and Fear

CHAPTER 9 Thrown Back to the Sea

CHAPTER 10 The Ghetto Gate Closes

CHAPTER 11 To Escape the Bond of Love

CHAPTER 12 Slaughter and Survival

CHAPTER 13 The Victims and the Killers

CHAPTER 14 No Quarter Asked, None Given

CHAPTER 15 Consider the Consequences

CHAPTER 16 Father Forgive Them

CHAPTER 17 Living With Dogs

CHAPTER 18 Lowered to Betrayal

CHAPTER 19 First Levels of Hell

CHAPTER 20 March to Death and Liberation

CHAPTER 21 Ukrainian Agony

CHAPTER 22 Retreat in Fear

CHAPTER 23 Insistent Ghosts

Afterword

Selected Sources

To Harold and Martin,

who, together, first helped me touch the edge of understanding.

To Marjorie who pushed me to completion.

To the courage and strength of the survivors.

To the memories of those who perished.

To those who lie in forgotten, nameless graves.

Preface

What right do I have to write this book? I have none. I am not a survivor of the Holocaust. I was born at the close of the Second World War. I am not a Jew. I am not a victim. I have never fought in a war, and I have never been a prisoner of war. I have never experienced anything like the torture, depravity, and deprivation that were the essence of the Holocaust and the many other atrocities of the Second World War. When I think of what I have done I am afraid, and I feel a deep need to apologize for my impertinence.

I am like a man who has knocked on the locked door to a dark and hidden room. Two men I have never known answer the door. Because of my ignorance, my conversations with them are clumsy, even insensitive at times. But they decide to risk their own peace, as they have done so many times before. They welcome me into the endless room, filled with a vast Jewish family that I do not know. Smaller rooms to the side are filled with other families, related to the Jews in the central room only by their dreadful fate. I have a deep need to know this family, to understand this family, and so I have decided to write about it. I humbly ask those of you that are part of the family to forgive my clumsy intrusion into your lives and into your memories.

This book developed as a product of my own search for understanding. It is a documentation of my own journey, or perhaps more appropriately my quest. I cannot tell you when or even how I will know when I reach my destination. The final destination is obscured in my mind, shrouded in my own personal fog of ignorance, prejudice and misunderstandings.

I do not pretend to be a qualified historian of the Holocaust, or of the Second World War. But as a poor student I must ask myself some simple questions. What were the forces that allowed so many people, most of them practicing Christians, or at least educated as Christians, to participate in the beating, torture, and destruction of so many innocent people? And if they did not participate, how could they stand by and do nothing to help? How could it be that the German perpetrators could rely so completely on the help of members of the local, Christian population in their goal to annihilate the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe? What made the German military treat captured soldiers, particularly the Russians, with such vicious brutality? How could they so easily choose so many others, because of their race, their beliefs, their lifestyles, or their politics, and mark them for death? If we can truly understand, even a little, how a small dark cloud of evil grew and transformed itself into the hurricane of hatred that spread across the land, if we can answer at least some of these questions in our own minds, in our own souls, perhaps we can help prevent the next repetition. So far, recent history tells us that we have not learned our lessons very well.

And what about the victims themselves? What was it that held the Jews in place, long enough for them to be overcome? Was it loyalty to family, or history, or trust? Was it all these things? What bonds of family and heritage, what belief in the foundations of civilization could be so strong? How did some few Jews, in the face of fearsome odds and a lack of resources, escape death and become partisans and killers in their own right? And how could the survivors of so much torture and depravity possibly walk away from those terrible stolen years of their lives without soul-destroying bitterness and hatred? They turn to their family, but there is no one there. They remember their childhood friends, stolen away from them and gone forever. They cannot return home, for the home they knew no longer exists. How can they bear the scars of such hateful betrayal, personal loss, abandonment, and torture, even after so many years?

As I examine the personal accounts of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and as I interview survivors, I am in every case humbled by the demonstration of the strength of the individual, and the determination and ability of ordinary people to survive in degrading and seemingly impossible circumstances. Some people have asked me if I find myself depressed after completing an interview or after reading the many personal accounts. I must answer that I do not. My feelings, though, are complex and difficult for me to explain. I am perplexed and deeply disturbed to see how easily ordinary human beings can perpetrate incredible atrocities upon their fellows. It seems to be so easy to torture those who stand out, who are different, and so easy to be cruel to the helpless. I am horrified by the scale of the thing. I am humbled by the strength and courage of the survivors, and by the simple acts of kindness extended, albeit by far too few and at great risk, to the hunted, the pursued, and the persecuted.

This book is not an account of personal survival. Neither is it a recitation of the horrors of the Holocaust, though some of the incidents described in this book are horrible enough. Though it focuses on the fate of the Jews, it is not exclusively a Jewish story. It does not itemize and catalogue the atrocities and tortures perpetrated on the Jews and other unfortunate victims. It does not examine the details of life in the death camps. I dare not go there. It does not examine the special cruelty of the German treatment of the Soviet prisoners of war. Finally, it does not examine the cases of those who risked their lives to give aid and assistance to the Jews and other victims.

This book is not history. I am not qualified to write that history. In detail the book is fiction, but most of the stories have their foundation in the facts of personal interviews. I have also developed some from brief comments and descriptions from the literature of survivors and historians of the Holocaust. I have not annotated my sources in detail, as this is not meant to be a scholarly work, but I have listed a small number of sources for additional reading. Using the results of my own few contacts and interviews coupled with many written sources, I have attempted to develop a feeling, an understanding, of the complex tapestry of life around the choices that confronted those caught up in the whirlwind of the Holocaust.

In many cases the details of the events examined in this book are unrecorded in historical documents. Perhaps they are considered too unimportant to warrant memorialization, or perhaps they are lost in the time that has passed. Of necessity, some of the details therefore come from my imagination, as part of my attempt to give a full measure of life and understanding to the stories. However, the character of the SS officer, Hans Grüber, is entirely fictional. He acts as our guide, the sometimes confused and troubled perpetrator himself, connecting the scenes in the different stories, but as an actual individual he does not exist.

I do not consider this book to be a novel. Is it possible to write a novel about the Holocaust and the many other atrocities of the Second World War without insulting the victims of those events? I suspect it is not. Reading a novel should be enjoyable, if somewhat challenging. I hope that no reader truly enjoys this book. In reading this series of stories, I hope that instead you will become as deeply troubled by the images presented to you as I have been. I hope that because of these stories you will find it impossible to forget that real people committed unspeakable atrocities upon the Jews, the prisoners of war, and many other helpless civilians during the Second World War.

The perpetrators of these atrocities are as familiar to us as our neighbors, simple, ordinary people. You and I are the perpetrators under different circumstances. The torturers and murderers were not monsters at birth. As has been so eloquently emphasized by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, to say that they were trivializes their actions. Often they were well educated. In their youth, in many cases, their parents ensured that they attended church, in one Christian faith or another, perhaps assisting the Priest or singing in the choir. In many cases, even in the midst of the ruthless killing, the killers and torturers could and did act as good and honorable men, faithful husbands, caring fathers, once they were away from the killing grounds. Many were proud of the work they did. Some sent snapshots of their work back to the family. How could such people participate, or even stand by silently, as the killing machine of the Holocaust was built and run with such deliberate forethought and efficiency?

They grew up in a country of great culture. But their history and the Nazi propaganda machine, even the Christian church itself, burdened them with ageless prejudice that was easily fanned into racial and religious hatred. Events of the war traumatized them and poisoned their souls, obliterating ordinary human compassion for their fellow men and women. They beat, tortured, starved and murdered their victims by the hundreds, by the thousands, even by the millions. Yet, searching the face of their history, or the horror of their personal experiences, can we find any excuse that can pardon their behavior? I do not think we can. Is there anyone living who is fully qualified to forgive them? I do not believe there is. Only the dead can forgive, and for them it is too late.

It is difficult for most of us, even impossible at times, to fully understand the scale and monstrousness of some of the crimes of the Second World War and the Holocaust. We have led such sheltered lives. No matter how difficult, we must come to understand the implications of these events if the human race is to maintain its humanity. The grotesque statistics of the Holocaust obscure the victim and the perpetrator as human beings. Many of the personal accounts, of necessity, focus on the narrow perspective of a single victim’s experience.

In a small way, this book attempts to examine the personal and emotional aspects of the broader landscape of the terror of the time. It tries, though I fear that it may fail in nearly all respects, to recreate for the reader the intensity of experience and decision of the victims within Germany and in the occupied lands. It attempts to bring the victims and the perpetrators into some kind of focus, against the unforgiving background of terror and death, to help us see both as fellow men and women, with their own histories, hopes, dreams, and sometimes terrible and overwhelming flaws. It tries to capture some of the fear and struggle of the bystanders, who did nothing to stop the atrocities, who found the burden of their own survival too heavy to shift, who in their fear and ancient prejudice could not accept their human obligation to help their neighbor. As I look into the faces of each character in this series of stories, I see, as if in a shattered mirror, brief and broken reflections of a self I do not always wish to know.

The evil we see stretches beyond religion and race, even beyond humanity. It swirls around the prisoners of war, sick and undernourished, taking that last, senseless march through the snow, on roads parallel to the endless streams of dying Jews. It encompasses the masses in Eastern Europe, considered subhuman by the German conqueror, destined to starve and die to give the Germans the space, the living room, they desired in their new lands. The evil washes across all who stood apart, all who did not fit within the rigid boundaries of an obscene plan. But in this black tide, against which so very few would stand, a special place was set for the Jews of the land, a special place of universal death and annihilation.

What images scar the minds of the survivors? When young children pass them in an orderly line on a field trip, do the Jewish survivors still see the children walking toward the gas chambers? When they see the man in uniform, no matter how well intentioned, do they relive the blow of the club and the stab of the bayonet? When a young father plays with his infant son, tossing him in the air, do they see the image of young children tossed into the air and used for target practice by the murderers? Indeed, how do they manage to survive their own memories? Many could not and chose death over remembrance. Those who have survived the searing memories, and who have had the courage to speak and write, leave us a gift, a treasure, with a value beyond any human calculation.

I do not profess to know the answers to the questions I have posed here or elsewhere in this book. Even in my imagination, the characters in the stories in this book do not know all the answers. As I say in my dedication, I have, perhaps, touched the edge of understanding, but I have no simple or clear answers to offer. Nevertheless, before we condemn the perpetrators and the silent bystanders, before we entertain even a fleeting and unworthy thought critical of the actions of any survivor, we must place ourselves in the full context of their life experience. We must abandon ourselves to the fierce embrace of the prejudice, the propaganda, the fear, the pain, the all-consuming hunger, the random and brutal killings, and the death sentence pronounced for anyone who stood against the will of the perpetrators. In that context of overwhelming terror and loneliness, we must examine what our own actions and reactions would have been. It is an unpleasant and nearly impossible task.

I hope that this book, presented as the documentation of my search for understanding, will help and inspire you in your own search. I hope, too, that you will be inclined to examine, as truthfully as possible, how you would have behaved in that terrible time and place, as a Jew, as a German soldier, as a soldier in the SS, as an ordinary Christian. Many times I have asked myself, raised a Christian and still a believer in the Christian concept of the universality of humanity and love, how I would have behaved. Unhappily, I must admit that if I am honest I am not always proud of my answers, for like most of us I am not particularly brave.

Harry James Cargas says, in Reflections of a Post-Auschwitz Christian, Silence, which can be holy, can also be sinful. Silence in the face of the Holocaust, I submit, is truly blasphemy. It is part of Christian teaching that God exists in every person. We dare not forget, then, that one million Jewish child-Gods were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in World War II. Five million other Jewish-Gods were slaughtered there also. An enormous number of non-Jewish-Gods were massacred as well.

We must speak of this event in history, and we must try to understand. We must force ourselves to summon the courage as individuals to stand in the face of genocide and the slaughter of innocents, to speak out, to rescue those we can, and to take action to protect the potential victims. In the world in which I wish to live, these actions are not optional. They are imperatives.

1

History and Heritage

In 1914.. .war came, out of a cloudless sky, to populations which knew almost nothing of it and had been raised to doubt that it could ever again trouble their continent.... The First World War.left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots. John Keegan, The First World War, 1998.

We saw them as the devil’s own children. You must understand. It was part of our culture, part of our religion. It had been taught to us for hundreds of years, over a thousand years. It is deep within us, and it didn’t take much to move us to kill. And it wouldn’t take much to do it all again. Hans Grüber jabbed his long bony finger at his chest as he spoke, as if to probe the depth of his convictions. He was angry, too, at what he saw as my inability to understand. Perhaps I was guilty of using that anger, and perhaps I pretended to understand less than I did to draw him out and force him to explain.

He reached over to a table and from a stack of books withdrew a small brown volume. He waved it at me as he continued. Martin Luther built the foundation of the German Lutheran church, my church. He flipped through the pages and stopped at the passage he sought. Listen to what he says about the Jews. We are at fault for not slaying them. Rather we allow them to live freely in our midst despite their murder, cursing, blaspheming, lying and defaming.’ This next section should sound familiar. ‘First,...set fire to their synagogues and schools, and.. .bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn so that no man will ever again see a stone or a cinder to them. In Deuteronomy 13 Moses writes that any city that is given to idolatry shall be totally destroyed by fire and nothing of it shall be preserved. If he were alive today, he would be the first to set fire the synagogues and the houses of the Jews.’

Hans looked at me, slammed the book closed in his hands and shook it at me. That’s the foundation of our Lutheran faith. He is the founder. And you wonder how we managed to believe that killing the Jews was justified? You wonder how so many Germans, ordinary Germans, managed to accept that murdering the Jews was not only justified but morally correct? If he had wanted it, Hitler didn’t need to look far to find a justification in religious teachings for the elimination of the Jews.

What about the Catholic teachings?

Hans laughed loudly. Hell, if anything they were worse. As early as St. Augustine in the fifth century the Catholic theologians damned the Jews for killing Jesus. When I was a child, the priests and the Lutheran ministers still preached that the Jews were the antichrist. He shrugged his shoulders. The worst was the blood libel of the middle ages. They accused Jews of ritualisti-cally murdering Christian children in their worship, or killing them to use their blood for preparing unleavened bread for the Passover meal. He shook his head. Do you know it was still a common accusation among the superstitious rural Poles when we entered Poland in 1939? He paused and shook his head again. Amazing.

Gently he returned the book to the stack and turned back to face me. His fury spent, his words seemed to trail off into a more thoughtful mood as he finished. He sank back into his chair. I looked again at the black and white picture on the wall. The young Hans stared out into the room in his clean, sharp SS uniform. The stylistic, slashing double SS stood out, clearly visible. Sitting beside the table piled high with books, he had not changed particularly, at least not physically. Certainly he had aged. After all, more than fifty years had passed since that picture had been taken of a starkly handsome and impetuous young man. I still saw the same angular features of his face in the chair across the room from me, though now the gaunt overlay of age pressed the angles of the face into an almost painful sharpness. His pale blue eyes still held a piercing brightness and intensity that was slightly unnerving. Staring at me intently, he sighed loudly.

You will not understand. It was a different time. You Americans are so sheltered, so damn self-righteous. He smiled. But I will try. I should start with my father, Heinrich. He was a quiet and gentle young man, a farmer with his father in Bavaria. As a young man he left the farm to fight in the First World War in France. He paused. That’s where all of this began.

In troubled times, the seeds of the First World War took root in the fertile soil of the equally troubled lands of the Balkans. The Serbs, a bitter people and masters of ethnic anger, tended the seeds with care. Even in 1914, five hundred and twenty-five years after the defeat of the Serbs by the Turks, Serbian anger and nationalism still burned and festered. On June 28 the small band of Serbian nationalists, five men in all, lost themselves in the streets and alleys of Sarajevo. Though poorly trained they were assassins nonetheless, armed with crude bombs, second-hand revolvers, and the determination that comes from wounded ethnic pride.

Franz Ferdinand, nephew to the Emperor, Franz Josef, glanced to the side and saw the man take his short, quick steps toward him. With an awkward, graceless motion, the man threw the small, dark object toward the car. Instinctively, the driver accelerated to get away from what he glimpsed as a potential problem. The borrowed car, powerful for its time, responded slowly to the driver’s intentions. As Franz watched, the small bomb seemed to arc through the air in slow motion, and he knew it would kill both him and his wife. Feeling the strange sense of being rooted to his place in the back seat of the open car, he did manage to reach across his wife to try to deflect the bomb. Because of the quick reaction by the driver, and the slight increase in speed, the bomb fell harmlessly against the side of the expensive Austrian car. For a moment it rolled and wobbled along the uneven cobbles of the street and then exploded under the following vehicle.

Franz jerked his head around in time to see the explosion and the damage it caused. The explosion had seriously wounded the occupants of the car, and dark red stains spread across the leather of the seats. He spoke quickly to his driver who, because of the distraction of the actual explosion, had momentarily slowed their progress. Keep moving, he shouted, and faster, man. He won’t be alone. Franz smiled at his good fortune. Someone else would look after the wounded.

Less than an hour later, on the way to the hospital to make a courtesy visit to those wounded in the bomb attack, his driver, so quick to avoid trouble earlier, took a wrong turn. As he stopped to correct his error, Gavrilo Princip found it hard to believe his luck. With three quick steps, coming from the side of the street, he raised his cheap pistol and fired twice. Franz’s wife died in an instant, and Franz followed her in no more than ten minutes.

An unfortunate incident of no great import in a troublesome land of never ending ethnic battles, it pulled at the threads of the fabric of the grand alliances. Those rigid bonds between the nations soon started a war that no one wanted, a war that would eventually destroy a whole generation of young men in its grinding, bloody, useless battles. In its painful ending the war accomplished little except to raise the curtain on the next, a far more deadly sequel. In many ways, it was the first act of the Second World War, and perhaps the first scene of what has become known as the Holocaust.

Heinrich Grüber received the news late in the day. The German mobilization had begun, and it swept him up into the reserves so quickly he barely had time to kiss his wife goodbye. He left with the hearty and brave words of the older men still sounding in his ears. With time he would learn that every one of them was either a liar, a braggart, or simply ignorant, but for the moment he swelled with the pride and confidence of a vigorous and patriotic young man. He also left with the sound of his weeping wife in his ears, and for some reason he could not understand, that, too, made him swell with pride.

In a passing moment, he found himself in his gray uniform, burdened under his heavy leather pack, a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, and lost in a surging sea of gray, indistinguishable humanity. At the same time, the army made a second mobilization of reserves, 715,000 horses, nearly one horse for every three soldiers. In what Heinrich perceived as complete chaos, the army of men started to sort itself, the horses, the artillery pieces, the food, the supplies and all the thousands of the supporting cast. They marched, they sat, they waited, and they marched again. Then they loaded and squeezed themselves and all their equipment onto the trains. From Germany alone, eleven thousand trains slowly carried the eager army to the front, but Heinrich’s train was one of a small number that turned north, away from the front, north to the shore to defend against the English.

The Germans, as always, had a plan, worked out in great detail by Field Marshall Alfred von Schlieffen. In a grand flanking maneuver through neutral Belgium, the great army of the young Germany would quickly sweep down from the north to capture Paris. The plan confidently predicted how many miles the army would march each day, how much food it would consume, and how much water it would drink. But it counted men like Heinrich as a soldier, not as a farmer in a soldier’s uniform. This army of accountants, shop keepers and farmers would not move according to von Schlieffen’s plan. Once the attack began the frustration of the officers grew each day. They watched the army move with shudders and false starts, a caricature of the efficient and well trained professional army they knew so well.

Besides the inability of the citizen soldier to act and perform like the professionals the officers dreamed of, the von Schlieffen plan had one other major flaw. It assumed that the Belgian forces would yield to the reality of the overwhelming might of the German army and offer no resistance to the invader.

According to plan, on August 4, 1914, the German forces entered Belgium, expecting little resistance. But the grand von Schlieffen plan didn’t take into account the pride of the Belgian people. The antiquated Belgian army, complete with a few machine guns pulled by dog teams, shocked the Germans with a stout defense of Belgian neutrality. Even before the end of the first day the frustration of the German officers mounted as they faced the surprisingly stiff and unexpected Belgian resistance on all fronts. Even on that first day the army fell behind in its timetable. As each hour passed the objectives seemed to recede further from the army’s grasp.

All the frustration and anger of the officer corps seeped down through the ranks. On August 4, 1914, on the same day as the army’s entry into Belgium, German officers ordered their soldiers to shoot six hostages in the village of Warsage, and then they burned the village of Battice to the ground. Rumors grew and traveled at a lightening pace, rumors of snipers on roof tops and behind hedges. There were rumors of partisans operating behind German lines and murdering German officers and men. Heinrich Grüber waited out the initial incursion into Belgium with two reserve divisions in Schleswig-Holstein, still guarding against the amphibious attack by the British on the North Sea coast, an attack that never materialized. The idle men fed hungrily on the rumors, and their idleness bred an anger that grew each passing day.

Finally, after more than two weeks of waiting, the generals called the poorly trained reserves away from the beaches, piled them and all their equipment onto trains once again, and fed the divisions into the main thrust across Belgium. The boredom and waiting of the camp transformed itself into the tedium of the train. In August the cars were stifling during the day, but with both doors open the atmosphere was bearable as long as the train kept moving. The logistical nightmare of moving the great army still clogged the rail lines, and the train stopped frequently. The stops were not so bad. They gave the men a chance to jump off the car and relieve themselves along the tracks, sometimes to the shock or amusement of the locals.

On occasion, when the train stopped, the supply corps gave them fresh water for their canteens. Two or three times a day they received food, usually cold sausage and cold, boiled potatoes. With a little straw in the cars, the trip was tolerable. When he could Heinrich sat in one of the open doors, smoked his pipe and watched as they passed the farms and small towns. With all the stops it took nearly two days and one night to travel about three hundred miles to the border with Belgium. That’s when they started to walk.

Heinrich and his friend Willy Lidke marched side by side in the long column of men and horses. The army carried its own billowing cloud of dust along with it. The dust coated the men and their sweat stained clothes. As it mixed with their sweat it caked like fine mud against their skin. It seeped into their noses and ears. They wiped it from their eyes, and some covered their mouths with handkerchiefs in a vain attempt to keep the dust out of their lungs. They couldn’t wash as they marched, and the army marched with a powerful stench of human sweat, horses and their sweat soaked, leather harnesses. The passing army left behind a trail of effluvia, broken equipment, human and animal excrement, and sometimes broken men.

Heinrich looked at the deep blue sky and wiped his muddy forehead. Well, Willy, if it wasn’t so damn hot, and if it wasn’t so damn dusty, this could be a nice day to take a hike.

Willy laughed. You’re crazy, you know.

Heinrich returned his laugh. You’re right. I’m crazy, but I figure that’s the only way I’ll survive this army. He looked around anxiously. Then he smiled when he spotted a few small bushes beside the road a short way ahead. They’ll do, he thought. I’ve got to take a shit, he said to Willy with a grin. The food they give us is so God damned greasy it slides right through me. I’ll catch up with you in a bit.

Willy returned his grin. Just watch where you step, and don’t play with yourself too long.

Heinrich stepped out of line, jumped over a small ditch half filled with fetid water and walked around the bushes. He swore softly as he saw the mess behind the bushes. He was not the first man to see the bushes as an opportunity for a little privacy, but at least he was alone for the moment. The sunlight glinted off the shining blue highlights of the large flies that coated the ground and buzzed insistently around his head. He swatted at them with no real effect and quickly looked for a clean spot to set down his pack and rifle. He stepped gingerly among the piles to find a spot where he could add his own contribution. It didn’t take him long. He wiped himself as best he could with his hand and