The Captain's Soul

By Suzanne Tomb

WORLD WAR 11 - EUROPEAN THEATER OF OPERATIONS

Chief interrogator on the IPW team of his V Corps unit, Captain Carl Linder is German-American. The war is personal to him, the defeat of his ancestral homeland paramount. And some of his interrogation team are German-born Jews who fled from the Nazis to America, joining the U.S. Army as fast as they could. Their battle is as personal as it gets. Although the unit's orders are that the war must always take precedence, the team is daily discovering the most bestial of undersides in the enemy's quest for European domination. The Holocaust, before it ever has the name, is revealing itself to them piece by unimaginable piece.

His teammates' family tragedies and his own volatile reunion with a cousin in the German army skew his focus on the day-to-day combat, while two very young war victims, one prey and one predator, challenge him to unlock the moral gut within himself that he so often questions.

You had to confront the line, crossing it or not, to recognize it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781477296752

Suzanne Tomb

Having attended universities in Vienna, Austria and New York, Suzanne Jenter Tomb is a former print and broadcast journalist and documentary writer/producer. Born in New York, she has lived in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands for many years.

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Prologue

1955

One way to go.

He recalled that Johann’s words had been uttered in a savage January blizzard that could have killed them all ten years ago.

Safe in his living room, the fire’s succor enveloped him as he sank into the leather of the easy chair he’d molded exclusively to his shape. Yet he remained unsettled at the sight and sound of sleet cutting sideways, hammering the windowpanes when the wind gusted. Mid-November, an early first storm of the season.

As quickly as it started, it changed, the ice daggers growing fur and losing their hostile, metallic sound. But the din only went to his eyes as the flakes bulked up and clung together in their descent. All he could see was winter, a winter of war. All he could hear were his cousin’s words.

He thought he glimpsed the mailman again, now across the street, slogging like a drenched, weighted, soldier performing his duty. Up this street, down the next. Only one way to go, every day, any day. Then the form disappeared, white chunks obliterating it. He wondered if the man had actually been there at all until he glanced down at the envelopes in his hand.

There were three letters. They were neither unexpected nor unwelcome. They were letters about boys, about what they had become, what they might have become. Boys growing up in the blizzard of war.

The letters would be full of what-if’s, conjecture that one circumstance or another might have made a difference. At bottom, he’d learned, people did what they were convinced they had to do. Decisions were made. Sometimes, wars were waged. Boys in the armies, even those on the sidelines, had their lives immutably altered, or ended, by the decisions of their elders. The young men in his unit had predicted the gamut of what-if’s that would follow, long years down the road, the war they had personally experienced.

A loud pop shot from the fireplace as a heavy log collapsed onto crimson kindling beneath it. He flinched, then watched the sparks funnel harmlessly up the chimney.

He stared down at the envelope on top, then lifted it in his hand. It was light, one-stamp-worth, and surely had to be light in its message. It came from his good friend and ex-Army buddy, David, who, as though cost was no object, had flown his family from New York to California to witness his only child’s matriculation to Stanford University pre-law. For some reason, however, David had addressed the letter to ‘Captain’ Carl Linder. Linder couldn’t remember David ever having used rank in their relationship, during or after their service together.

David had folded his short note on hotel stationery around a small, blurry photograph, one probably snapped by his wife’s nervous hands. It was a picture of the proud men of the family, in fresh haircuts and new Brooks Brothers suits. Young Josh was squeezed in the center and all three men wore distorted ear-to-ear smiles, either in anticipation of the flash or a fall off the edge of the earth.

The note simply said: "As you can see, we prepared for the occasion. Had to look right, don’t you think? Joshua at Stanford!

"Imagine, Carl, three generations here in America having this day, this moment. It has to be poetic in some way I wouldn’t know how to express. I could hope, I could dream, but I’m not sure I believed there was a good ending for us.

"Suppose I’d had a captain that was more a superior than a friend. Thank you, my friend, my Captain, for not letting me give up those many years ago in Prague.

David

P.S. See you at home soon."

Linder slid deeper into the supple leather. He had time alone in the house. He could read and think.

He scrutinized the faces in the picture, the older men’s eyes seeming to lock with his own.

It wasn’t my doing, Lieutenant, he said aloud. Somehow, against overwhelming odds, you found your way. And you know there were many times you helped me find mine.

He laid the letter and photograph on the coffee table and picked up the second envelope. It was from Europe, tiered with stamps and weighing heavier than David’s. Its stiffness suggested it too contained pictures. He studied the smeared postmark and the sender’s flowing handwriting. Claude was in Paris. Linder felt confident his young friend’s news was also positive.

Still, he followed the same ritual he’d adopted ten years ago, very carefully slicing the letter opener across the envelope’s edge and gently coaxing out its contents as if to ease their arrival into a benevolent light of day.

Claude was about Joshua’s age and, like Josh, had aspired and excelled. Since childhood, he’d always said he wanted to be an artist. Linder had saved the sketches Claude gave him during the war, renderings of his tiny village in Luxembourg, portraits of his dog, one of Linder himself as well. Even then, he could see that Claude was truly gifted.

In and of itself, the gift meant little when applying to one of France’s most elite institutions of artistic prodigy. But Claude was determined that this was the path he needed to take, knowing full well that he would also need some important Parisian clout in the process. The necessary influence was exerted forcefully, if with quiet confidence, by a wartime friend of Linder’s who was herself rapidly gaining repute in the field of photography. It all came together for Claude. He was in.

En route to the French coast to ship home after the war, Linder had detoured to Luxembourg and taken Claude to meet Marie Claire in Paris. A year later, at the ripe age of twelve, Claude arrived on her doorstep.

One of many boys who had joined the Resistance during the war, he knew his way around and, in his case, couldn’t quit roaming around afterwards. Marie Claire was familiar with the syndrome, having fed and sometimes hidden boys like Claude who’d operated above and below the streets of Paris and far out into the countryside. She had first-hand knowledge of what these children had to do to survive. Being unable to stop moving often became ingrained, she’d told Linder.

As it turned out, Linder believed he was right in hoping that Marie Claire could help Claude in ways he could not. To this day Claude’s own mother remained emotionally hobbled by the Nazi brutality visited upon her life, and she seemed almost indifferent to her son’s comings and goings. Claude just kept going and coming and going again, in an attempt to get past a time that could have been his end in one way or another.

For several years now, he had lived with Marie Claire and her husband in their Paris home during the winter months. When spring arrived, however, he didn’t need to be told to go home. He went back, dutifully, to see his mother and the other villagers, to help with the crops and livestock. To relive his personal history.

If Claude’s letter sounded somewhat giddy over his future prospects, Linder felt it was deservedly so. The boy’s humility returned as he related his recent quick trip home before beginning classes. To start with, he seemed encouraged that there was a kind of new vitality in the village, more kids running around, more life in general. He reported that everyone, two-legged and four-legged, was fine. His mother, on the other hand, was merely holding her own as closely as Linder could translate from the French.

I’m about to begin my instruction, perhaps before you receive this letter. I’ve enclosed photographs of some recent sketches which were well-received at the academy. What do you think of them? Marie Claire likes most of them but hates the one of herself. She says I made her too glamorous, but she is still glamorous, believe me!

Glamorous wasn’t quite the right word, Linder thought. Her face held much more, and Claude’s sketch, whether he knew it or not, had captured her. There was beauty and strength. There were also hints of both humor and pain in her gaze.

"I wonder where I would be, what I would be doing, if I’d never gotten to know you or Marie Claire. Would I have had this chance I have now? I’ll write as soon as I’ve gotten my first evaluations. Wish me luck.

Claude

P.S. Are Chrissy and Sari getting along any better than you described in your last letter?"

Linder wanted to tell him that, yes, he would have made it, with greater difficulty perhaps, but that his talent and spirit would have prevailed for him. Go it with encouragement and help or go it alone, he would have made his way.

No, Linder had to say to the postscript. He could easily curse the war again, this time for the sibling rivalry that had consumed his household in the past several months. His daughters’ births had been separated by over five years, one girl now verging on womanhood with all its normal preoccupations, the other secretly idolizing her sister while trying to make the adolescence she envied as miserable as possible.

He studied the recently-framed photograph of his wife, Annette, and her daughters, placed just so on the mantle. The picture was far from just so, the smiles strained. Chris, now fourteen, had announced that she would no longer be addressed as Chrissy. Sari, or Sarah, was following suit. In the photo, the little one was visibly yanking on the big one’s arm, as if to force her down. To what purpose—availability, assailability? Willful, often intractable, Sari would one day learn why she was named Sarah.

The war. It’s grip on time, its grip on circumstance. Sari’s birth was days short of nine months from the moment he’d reached American soil. She came with a burst. Annette thought Sarah would be a great name. She revered her late Aunt Sarah, so full of life, she said, a woman who had still been driving well into her nineties. The choice of names was a fit, his half of the choice something he’d never explained. Only David knew why Linder had to have a Sarah.

He lifted his eyes to the opaque window, the snow heaping on its sill and warning him what the driveway and road probably looked like by now. But he could hear a plow already at work down the block where his three girls had gone to see friends. They would only have a five-minute walk home.

Winter, how he hated it, always reminding him how dogged and defeating it could be, threatening to persist well after it was supposed to dissolve into spring. It had certainly surpassed itself that year, the weather fighting side by side with the Germans as if conspiring to outlast his men, body and sanity. His only gratitude for the conditions back then had come when the tears wanted to pour forth and froze instead as soon as they steeped his eyelids, damming the flood that ached to follow.

Claude’s letter lay alongside David’s on the table. The letter from his German uncle, Johann’s father, stared up at him as he turned his gaze to his fingertips, opening and closing his hands as he did so.

The tips should have been tingling in the ambient heat, but they were still partially numb. This was thanks to the frostbite they’d all suffered on that January day. Johann’s condition had been the worst because he’d been in the river that much longer. Incredibly, none of them had developed gangrene. He remembered wondering what the abominable stench was when it woke him the next morning in the field hospital.

The truth was, he remembered every bit of madness of those years as though it had taken place moments ago. Like the smells, it often hit him in surges. It was usually disjointed in chronological sequence but never at a loss for clarity. He’d told Annette virtually none of it, of the events or the people who inhabited them. He was well aware that she probably imagined much of what he relived, if only because it still lived so plainly within him.

He had, however, told her about his time spent with Marie Claire and their continued relationship involving Claude. Aside from what Annette said, or didn’t say, he sensed that she would not have begrudged him this connection.

The two women had actually spoken on the phone once, about what he wasn’t really sure. He’d tried not to listen. Their conversation was part English, part French and full of laughter, punctuated with several soft-spoken um-hums. He did discern them thanking each other for sustaining the men—Carl, Claude, and who knew how many males that had needed nurturing during and after the war. He’d rolled his eyes. Women. They could be possessive to the bone, often controlling to the point of infuriation. In the next instant, they were completely non-territorial, literally handing over their men to some universal matriarchy.

While he was sure many men had experienced this, he also assumed they didn’t need to understand it. It was just there for them. The trick would be, if a guy could figure out even this much, to prepare for which persona a woman might assume at a given juncture.

Annette, he knew, was fond of David, though she saw him infrequently and was barely acquainted with the rest of his family. Linder had glimpsed her looking at David curiously, as if wondering how there could exist awful memories like her husband’s behind David’s incredibly warm, kind eyes. His memories are far worse, Linder stopped himself from telling her. She had no idea that, among David’s family, Josh alone had been born American or that that fact itself meant that other family members were alive today.

Annette and the girls had met Claude too, about four years ago when Linder sent him passage for a visit to America. It was a visit full of fun and activity. Linder’s family would have had no inkling that Claude also might well not be alive today, nor that Claude’s father had died so that his wife and son might be spared.

As he scanned it, the array of mail on the coffee table seemed to be regarding him at the same time. He hadn’t yet touched the third letter, the one from Germany.

He and his Uncle Franz regularly stayed in touch, especially since Linder’s own father was going through his final struggle with cancer two years ago. While the brothers’ relationship had been strained after Linder’s father emigrated to America, they had righted it long before the war. And given that Franz had denounced Hitler from the beginning, there was no conflict of sympathies between the two of them.

If Annette and Chris and Sari knew very little of David’s family’s past or Claude’s early life, they knew next to nothing about Linder’s German relatives. Since his father’s death, David was the one person on this side of the ocean with whom he shared any of Johann’s story. David had been there for part of it.

Johann’s story. And all the question marks. For Josh and Claude, the vicissitudes of turbulent times had perhaps ordained that they would, ultimately, be stronger, better men. Time would tell. Like them, Johann too had shown plenty of brains, talent and ability from a young age. But his story would be written differently, and Linder wished to this day he could have influenced the what-if’s that glared at him from Johann’s youth.

The solicitous rite that was his painstaking method of opening personal mail had started during the war. Anxious for news of family and friends, he’d wanted to rip open the envelope and devour its contents. But there was always the fear. What would there be inside the protective sheath with his name on it? To laugh about, shed a tear over, to worry about in total helplessness because he was so far away. Hi Sweetheart or My Beloved Son. His heart rhythm jumped and dived with every Army mail pouch coming toward him.

As irrational as it might seem today, one had to have been there back then. He still studied the envelope first, the stamps and postmark date, but especially the handwriting. Was it steady or hurried, normal or somehow out of character?

Then he’d slit the edge ever so carefully, drawing the essence out to reveal itself. He realized that it was one of those solipsistic kid things like Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back. Yet, he followed the regimen, denying to himself that it was more superstition than habit, if he could detach the two at this point. David said that he opened his mail the same way, that he had ever since a letter about his family in Germany arrived soon after D-Day.

Aren’t you going to open your mail? Annette would ask him after she’d sorted it on the kitchen counter.

Later, he’d say. I need to unwind from a long day first. He never let anyone, including her, see him open his personal mail. Knowing she wouldn’t look at it, he nevertheless stashed it away.

He picked up Franz’s letter, examining the handwriting on the envelope that was identical to his father’s and quite like his own. Genes, he murmured, no choices there. Opening the envelope as gingerly as always, he again felt a stiffness within that he guessed were more photos. He lifted his eyes to the flames in the fireplace, willing that Franz and his wife, Katherine, were healthy.

The snowfall had dwindled to fine wisps hardly visible against a brightening backdrop, the dark gray outside having lifted to move on with the front. Three kids, bundled in jackets and boots and mittens, flew out of the house across the street. Ignoring the porch steps, they dove headlong into a wide drift, laughing and squealing as they landed like one clump and sank, then popped up immediately. The biggest child already had his first snowball packed to hurl.

Linder peered up the street for a sign of his family. Either they were having an especially good time or just waiting until the snow stopped altogether. He would read Franz’s letter and, if they weren’t back by then, he’d go and see if they wanted his company on the way home. He could picture it now, Sari packing snowballs like the kids across the street, her mother and sister warning her not to think about launching one in their direction.

Even as he slid the folded sheets from the envelope, he knew his uncle’s letter and the images enclosed would weigh heavily upon him. He knew also that he could no longer put off an important decision. One way to go simply meant one thing to do. The second half of Johann’s self-imposed pejorative that day had been just as pressing: one point in time to go there.

Meaning now, Linder told himself. Later today when the girls returned, or maybe at the dinner table this evening, he needed to read at least parts of the letters to them and show them the pictures. He had to start somewhere. He certainly had to stop also, before opening some monstrous floodgate he couldn’t control. He’d locked his family out of a crucial piece of his life.

Much of it, he never would, or could, relate, for good reason. But there were people in those years, people in these letters, who needed to be recognized three-dimensionally. He could hear all the questions that would fly at him, especially from Sari. How to answer, how to frame these individuals, without inadvertently straying into frightening territory.

Big one, he said out loud. He’d never before come close to any such dialogue. But Franz’s letter sat in front of him, his uncle having asked him all sorts of questions about Johann in previous correspondence, only to get vague replies. This letter, Linder presumed, held memories and photos of Johann, and another quest by Franz to fill in the blanks of his son’s life in the last year of the war. He’s not about to talk to me, Franz had written, so I have to ask you.

And ask Franz did, more and more in recent letters. It was as if his uncle feared losing precious time to understand those years in which his family’s life had been so altered and his son so alienated.

Linder hadn’t put on an LP this afternoon, yet a faraway strain drifted toward him as he unfolded his uncle’s letter. Franz’s forlorn cello whined under the closed door of the parlor in the old house on the German coast. He had vehemently objected to his teenage son’s choices and so feared where they would lead him, but he couldn’t get Johann to listen. Franz’s playing had been the solo of a failed man, and a father forsaken.

In the letters of late, however, Linder sensed a reconciliation on his uncle’s part, as though the distance of years had tempered the anger and guilt and refocused his thoughts on happier times. But only to a point. The questions still came, before the close of each letter. It was becoming a plea Linder could no longer side-step.

Gratefully, Franz’s news began on a good note. He and Katherine were well and busy, supervising interior work on the only home they’d ever known in their married life. Linder guessed they had to have been there at least forty years. All of a sudden he could see them, young and striking in their bearing, impeccably attired in formal evening wear as they greeted dinner guests in the foyer with its elegant chandeliers.

Tradition, correctness always. It was their foundation, and their rule for every grain of existence. This absolute in his young life had perhaps pushed Johann even harder to rebel. Yet, while he rebelled against the constraint, he did so in exchange for much greater, riskier, limitations that could shackle a lot more than youthful disposition.

We have been combing through the household as the repair work begins, Franz wrote, cleaning out all the stuff we’ve accumulated over the years and don’t need in the slightest. In the process, we have found some treasures, not just to save but to share with you.

Linder tentatively lifted the stack of photos and spread them out on the coffee table. There was Johann with the visiting American Linder boys when they were primary school age, then Johann in a formal portrait with his parents when he was eleven or twelve. Johann. Never a full smile on his mouth, but always a glint in his eyes, distinguishable even in these weathered images. Johann’s were the eyes of a youngster with a goal, a goal that might change from month to month in a formative mind, yet a goal with self-induced, compelling, pressure behind it. It was this urgency, albeit during volatile times, that would command his cousin’s early manhood and dictate choices no son of Franz Linder would have predictably made.

Alike enough in one respect, two very strong wills collided. Linder believed Franz was beginning to understand this element of the estrangement but probably remained oblivious to who his son really was. The push was now on to find out.

There was one shot of Johann that Franz said he couldn’t remember being taken and that seemed unusual. Johann was sitting cross-legged, alone, his back to the camera as he looked out over the meadow behind his parents’ home. It was unusual mostly because Johann was never still. But Linder remembered well just such a day he’d found his cousin in the same place, the same position.

As he approached, he thought he heard sobs. Johann, sensing someone coming, lifted his shoulders and quieted.

Johann, why are you crying?

I wasn’t crying, Johann muttered.

Okay. Why are you sitting here like this? Why are you upset?

My dog just killed my cat, Johann said hoarsely, the rasp in his voice from the sobbing still evident.

Linder, twelve at the time, stopped and sank in the grass by his younger cousin. What happened? he asked softly.

I thought they were friends, friends enough anyway. He sniffled. I know they were different from each other, but I thought they were all right together. He would bark at her, she would hiss and swing at his nose with her paw. Then they would both lie down right near each other and forget the whole thing.

So, what changed? Linder pressed.

Nothing, Johann said, his eyes now vacant. They were different is all. He paused and frowned. Sometimes I wondered if he really did grab her, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He would shake and shake, and break her neck.

Linder was silent.

That’s what he did, Johann said with no emotion, and I couldn’t get her free.

Where are they? Linder asked, wanting to throw his arm around Johann but deciding against it.

I don’t know where Peti went. I chased him off. I buried Sissy over there, he pointed to the one spot in the field devoid of grass because of the digging.

Have you told your father? Linder asked tentatively, knowing the answer before it came.

Johann frowned again, this time looking annoyed, as if to question why he would do such a thing. I’m supposed to be grown-up. Father says I’m old enough to handle the animals by myself.

Johann angrily swatted the grass at his side, bolting up in one swift movement with no use of his hands, and took off across the field. He was out of sight in a few seconds.

Linder stood and crossed to Sissy’s grave, thinking her death, especially by the family’s dog, was an awful lot for an eight-year-old to deal with on his own.

At home, in America, he too had to take care of the pets, feed them and clean up after them. He couldn’t imagine his parents having him cope with their deaths, however they happened, by himself.

He had stared out at Johann’s path through the grass, feeling there was little he could do or say to help. He’d wanted to speak to his uncle. Unsure what to say, or how, he knew he would not.

He remembered puzzling over, if not in so many words, what it was about this place, these people—relatives included—that could so deny a child a child’s natural pain. He’d loved his Uncle Franz but was glad his father wasn’t like him. He recalled thinking on that afternoon, after he watched Johann charge off, that his own father would have been there, would have tried to talk to him, maybe even held him.

If his memory read back correctly, it was days later that Franz noticed the cat missing and asked Johann about her. Straight-faced and without a twinge, Johann replied that a fox had killed Sissy and that she was buried out back. Linder didn’t remember any reaction from his uncle, nor any mention of the family cat coming up again. It was obviously an episode Franz had no memory of today.

When I discovered the photographs of you boys together, Franz went on, I could picture those wonderful summer afternoons watching you horse around on the beach and in the fields, up, down, up, down, chasing each other hour after hour until sunset when Katherine corralled you for supper.

Here it comes, Linder thought.

Carl, I believe I know how you are, and I don’t want you second-guessing whether you could have changed Johann’s path from boyhood to manhood. You are doing that as you look at these photos, just as I do each time.

He described Linder as always having been the stalwart, even at times he might be caving inside or scared to death. I was much the same, perhaps more so, Franz wrote. I couldn’t channel Johann’s passion, the incredible fire in him, because I didn’t have it, didn’t grasp what it was.

Franz harked back to another era, and the words of a man he called the master storyteller. Remember ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Dickens? ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ Here I had a son, so bright and talented, outstanding in athletics and all the future before him. Much glory before me too, I’m sure I imagined. And he’s growing up in a time when none of the opportunities can be realized for the right reason. All of a sudden, it’s whose is he, mine or the state’s. From there on I lost all comprehension of how things were supposed to be and who he might become.

Linder stared into the fire, beseeching the heat to dry the tears that were building. How things were supposed to be. Any and every supposition was dangerous in those times. Most of the men in his unit hadn’t had normal teenage years either. Their young lives were ones of hiding in alleyways, trying to elude the Gestapo, having to deny or be persecuted for who they were. They were different.

With no one but his father could he begin to sort through such a mountain of events and memories they had left in their wake. Because his father saw so well from whence it stemmed. In the heart of Europe, in its miasma of shifting borders and paranoias. Choice died daily in an increasingly phobic society conjuring up simplistic, scary dogma and obvious scapegoats for the most convoluted problems.

Franz’s next words echoed Linder’s thoughts. Your father, the person who probably understood you most intimately, is gone. I am still here. Your wife, your companion for life, is here. Humanity, Carl, even in the worst of times, is there and it is the story that needs telling to those of us here.

Linder laid the letter in his lap, his mind weary. He focused on the fireplace, noticing that the flames had reduced most of the wood to ashes, leaving only a couple charred, disfigured hunks of logs. He shot upright and out of his chair as he fought against the ashes taking on the smell he couldn’t bear and the burned logs becoming the fragments so often piled in his nightmares. He gulped and held his breath, leaning toward the window and the carefree scene across the street. The children were still there, tumbling and laughing, covered in the white of fresh snow. Snow, not ashes. Hastily, he threw more logs on the fire and turned his back to it. There were, he acknowledged, far worse things than snow and cold.

He retrieved Franz’s letter from the floor where it had fallen and began pacing with it, folding and unfolding the pages along their creases before he lifted them to his eyes once more.

If you need to know it all, my uncle, he said to the handwriting that blurred before him, me, Johann and all that we came to know, I’m not sure I can tell you.

If it was for some sort of release, or a presumed shared catharsis, the answer had to be no. There wasn’t one. He and David registered this knowledge repeatedly, without a word, without even a look. If there was any solace at all, it was born of the deepest appreciation, between himself and someone like David, that there existed no such possibility.

His uncle bore on to a conclusion, and the request Linder deemed inevitable.

I am of the old school, regardless of society’s myriad divisions, that believes there can be goodness even in war, sometimes especially in war. There are conventions without formal or arbitrary names that prevail because of simple moral decency and that will wear down the Hitlers and their thugs every time in the end. I think you believed it too. It worked, didn’t it?

That which worked, Linder thought, he had never truly figured out, not to this day.

Tell your family at home what is ‘manageable’, if I can put it that way, for you, for them. As for me, your German uncle, don’t spare me. Tell me about you, about Johann, about the people you both came to know under extraordinary circumstances. The human spirit, Carl. If there’s meaning to it all, perhaps this is the framework.

Linder drew a deep breath and turned to the fire again, the revived flames spitting up the chimney and making the room almost too warm. He looked across the street. The three kids were worn out now, soaked and spent and dragging themselves up the porch steps. Down the street, he could see Sari running and sliding in front of Annette and Chris, her taunting with snowballs apparently dashed by edict.

He dropped his eyes to the final paragraphs of his uncle’s letter and wondered if, had Franz ever deigned to admit the Nazis’ potential to control his countrymen’s minds, he would be grappling so for an anti-toxin after the fact.

I wish I could hold only the sweet pictures of my heart’s dreams, you boys romping in the fields with tomorrow not even a seed in your minds. It can’t be. But still, Carl, all those dreadful days and months that came later were about people—good, bad, or somewhere in between like most of us. It was people, my dear nephew, at precise moments in time, that helped keep you whole, bring you home, and who will live with you forever. I am ‘too little, too late,’ as you Americans would say, in wishing I had figured in more. But I think that perhaps Johann did, and still does.

The tears burned now as Linder stepped outside. He grabbed two small chunks of snow and quickly rubbed his puffy eyes, jolting himself into the moment just as Sari skidded sideways toward him and started to go down. He scooped her up and into his arms in one motion, pressing his warm cheek to her icy one.

The scare from her near-fall that had darkened her eyes disappeared instantly as he leaned his head away from hers, half-frowning and winking at the same time.

Good slide, Linder said. You could try that going to first next summer in softball league. Don’t tell your mother I said that.

Her eyes widened more, the fear completely replaced by the purest excitement of a child.

Daddy, I have so many things to show you!

He looked over his shoulder as he carried his daughter to the porch. Annette and Chris were smiling and shaking their heads at him. Sari was too big to be carried any longer.

Okay, he said with enthusiasm as he set her down. You show me first and then I have things to show you, and your mother and sister.

What things? She leveled her eyes on his, her look curious and penetrating as always.

Pictures, he said. Some people you know, some you don’t. I have some stories too. Tonight at supper, alright?

Sari nodded. Stories about when you were a boy hiking in Europe? she asked expectantly. They’re great. She blinked hard and looked up at him. And they help a lot when the vegetable is lima beans.

I know, he sighed in not-so-mock sympathy, brushing her wet bangs off her forehead and turning as his other two ladies approached. He gathered each in an arm and placed a peck on their noses. Chris was now only an inch or so shy of Annette’s height.

Sari pushed her way into the middle, clutching him around his waist.

Daddy has pictures to show us later, and stories to tell us, she announced as the bearer of exclusive news.

Annette caught his eye and he saw the corners of her mouth droop with a tinge of sadness. He was sure she noticed the redness still framing his eyes and was equally sure she guessed there had been another letter from Franz. She had seen the effect on him of their more frequent arrivals in recent months.

Her moist eyes smiled ruefully. She understood what he felt he needed to do. He would let her and the girls in a piece at a time, as much as he could, when he could. But Franz was getting old. He had to know more, and sooner. Linder watched her look turn to a question, asking him how he was going to be able to begin this process.

He put his mouth to her ear. I don’t know, he whispered. I’ll just have to figure a way as I go.

He spun his armload of women around. Now, let’s get out of this miserable cold. If you’ve got the cocoa and marshmallows, I’ve got the perfect fire.

He ushered his family inside, stopping to turn once again and follow the clouds moving off in the distance. The sky was clearing, blue overtaking gray. Perhaps there would be one more nice autumn break before winter dug in to stay until next year.

My father’s brother, he wanted the salutation to read in his next letter to Franz. Then he might start with, I know you realize you are asking so very much from a man who would like to forget so very much. I’m not at all sure I can give you what you believe you need.

His uncle was right to a point. There had been profound spirit and kindness both in this brute of a war. There had also been a persistent, deep stain regularly surfacing on the human race. How the scales weighed in the end he was no one to judge.

‘The best and the worst.’ True, of course, but not much more than rhetorical in the chronicling that was now well underway about this particular war and the particular epoch that birthed it.

Linder stood alone by the fire as his girls quibbled about vegetables in the kitchen. He smiled, loving the sound of their voices. He wished he could explain to Franz that there was war and then there were lima beans. One of those entities only stuck to your senses for a moment, gratefully disappearing with minimal aftertaste. He wondered if his uncle could appreciate the distinction.

Chapter I

Norman Night-School

Darkness no longer felt like stagnating time so much as shrinking space, a tight box of coordinates on the landscape in which blind men fended off the sleep that could render them tomorrow’s unlucky numbers in the casualty reports. The rain, turned-to-mist, turned-to-fog and then rain again, blanketed both day and night. But it was the dark hours that assumed the feel of inescapable confinement and vulnerability. Ears, nose, and the hair on one’s arms had to compensate for the loss of sight when dusk daily sank to black and took its hostages. Right now the earth seemed to have gone motionless.

For a few seconds he thought he could actually hear the cavern of a pure hiatus, like some kind of drone vibrating in his skull. Total stillness, as infrequently as it came in his everyday world at home, had never scared him. This was different. It was the frozen breathless interval a child endured watching a horror movie, sitting paralyzed just before Dracula was sure to smash the window with fangs bared.

A well-timed belch from a nearby foxhole brought his breath back, and even the mortar rounds resuming in the distance were welcome. It was all proof that man’s customary world of noise and commotion lived on very functionally, wherever the monsters might be lurking until the light of day sent them to bed.

And yet there was many a moment during the nights that Linder questioned whether dawn would again emerge when it was supposed to, let alone if he and the others would be there to greet it. Overhead somewhere was the slimmest crescent of a moon but, like the men of the V Corps’ G-2 section, it too was hiding. The clouds seldom parted in this place, he thought. Stifling a yawn, he began vigorously rubbing his teeth with his finger. The only consolation he could come up with was that it was probably as difficult for the German Panzer Grenadier regiment to locate his unit as it was for the unit to see the regiment coming.

He started to inch his head above the lip of the foxhole, straining to glimpse the G-2 men dug in close by. He ducked as mortar sprayed the sky white. Both the intelligence reports and his senses confirmed that the action was currently moving north and away from their position toward the British sector. Linder ordered his nerves to settle down and again peered above ground level to re-fix the bearings in his worm’s eye view of the world.

He came eyeball to eyeball with a strange-looking French bug, half dead, teetering on the hole’s edge, a precipice that must have seemed terrifying to it. He flicked it into the darkness, thanking his stars that he’d made it out of the savage waves at Omaha Beach. Worm, ant, or a man in a First Army infantry uniform, they all occupied the same strata of the planet, layers where annihilation was a daily peril but where there was at least air to anticipate when you opened your mouth or flared your nostrils.

But that was clearly where the good news stopped. A foxhole didn’t do much to give you an advantage over fellow earth-bounds of the dangerous human variety, let alone any sense of maneuverable power besides ducking. In the holes, the infantrymen were cut off at the neck or worse. Outside, they crawled, crept, and scrambled. He thought back to his classes in French, finding it uncomfortably significant that the word infantry in the language of its derivation had an obvious meaning besides foot soldier. So they were, virtual newborns feeling their way unsteadily, witnessing a war of colossal proportion through an untutored, self-centered lens that allowed events to occur only singly. Small encounter or mind-numbing crisis, incidents seemed to take place one by one by one, isolated without framework.

Truth or not, the concept of the foxhole reinforced the notion, certainly the isolation. Unlike the trenches of the Great War that amounted to a vast continuous network of men and materiel and communications from one side of the continent to the other, physical separation was now the rule in battle conditions. Linder tried to recall how many hundreds of times he’d heard the warning during Basic: never to cluster or bunch up, never to offer the plumper carrot. It obviously made sense target-wise, but he believed it also had to make the men less cognizant of each other’s actions, often relegating them to a guessing game over coordinating their moves and heightening their perception of helplessness. Thankfully, G-2 was tight with strong buddy systems developing. For his own part, he counted a handful of guys on whom he felt he could rely for nearly anything.

Operating from the foxholes had to be even worse for the Krauts.

He chuckled. Them with their collective mentality, their infernal belonging, especially with their squads regularly made up of men from the same town or region. This piece of information had surfaced in several recent interrogation sessions. He spat into the dark of his hole.

The shelling moved farther away and Linder poked his head up once more, still rubbing his teeth as he caught Chip O’Reilly’s silhouette against the flaming sky behind him. The two were about twenty feet removed, O’Reilly, too, lifting his head to scan his immediate surroundings. He snickered as he noticed Linder with his finger in his mouth. Linder offered up the middle finger of his other hand for O’Reilly’s benefit as he pictured his toothbrush lying on the bottom of the English Channel.

O’Reilly was one of Linder’s handful, but there were times he was also an unwanted mouthful. Catching Linder’s eye, he whispered for the umpteenth time this week one of his more disturbing questions.

How come us lieuies are still alive, Linder?

Linder tried to ignore him.

Don’t you think if…

Linder was almost grateful for the stray shell hitting the road fifty yards to the west, drowning out the man.

Linder, came the voice again as the blast died away.

Shut up, O’Reilly, he growled. You, for one, are damn lucky to be alive.

Another shell exploded a little farther afield but loud enough to halt the exchange. The sky burst into gold-white particles as a barrage of shells landed even more to the north. O’Reilly didn’t start up again. Linder sighed. Maybe the man was done for the night.

Linder hadn’t brushed his teeth since early last month unless he could count dipping his forefinger into a helmet of water and using his fingernail to try and scrape the crust off the enamel. His skin felt permanently crusty too, his face never with less than a two-day stubble anymore. A beard and mustache might not be a bad idea at this point since his wife wasn’t around to object. Body odor was another matter. At least now they could bathe once in a while in the near-frigid streams, but the climate of northern Europe would put an end to that before fall. So what, he reflected. They all stank the same.

Annette’s dead-on aim with a high-heeled shoe flashed before him and he ducked inadvertently again. It had been the night he told her he’d enlisted and requested to go overseas, that there was never any question in his mind about having to do it.

The other shoe had come flying at him and he’d caught it in mid-air, staring at its