Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

On the roads leading to Bastogne and the Elsenborn, all over the Bulge, the Americans suddenly find that they have fighters roaring overhead to lacerate the Germans with missiles and bombs and bullets.

“You hear about General McAuliffe?” Rainy asks, trying to keep Frangie engaged and awake.

Frangie shakes her head.

“He’s the 101st’s commander. The Krauts sent him a message under a white flag. Said we should surrender to avoid loss of life.”

Despite herself Frangie finds a tiny glimmer of interest. “What’d he say?”

“He sent back a one-word message: Nuts.”

The fighters roar. The parachutes fall, bringing food and medicine and ammunition. The Americans, down to little more than bayonets and beans, once more will have the tools of victory. Food, medicine, bullets, mortar shells, artillery rounds, and a sky full of P-47s and P-38s.

From the eternal forest comes the savage roar of soldiers who understand now that they may go on freezing, may go on fighting, and maybe dying, but who now understand as well . . . that they will win.

PART V

THE CAMPS

All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.

—Rod Serling

31

RAINY SCHULTERMAN, RIO RICHLIN, AND JENOU CASTAIN—BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, NEAR WEIMAR, GERMANY

“I need a driver and some muscle,” Rainy says.

Rio looks up from the letter she’s reading. She is sitting at a table, out of doors, outside the mess tent, in a world that is chilly but not freezing. In front of her is a tray, half-eaten: a mound of scrambled eggs, two fat sausages, a short stack of pancakes, coffee, and strawberry ice cream.

Actual ice cream.

Rio wears a reasonably clean uniform and—for the first time in recent memory—is not being tortured by lice. This had required shaving her head bald before taking a walk through the delousing tent, and all she has now is a bare half-inch of dark bristle.

“Why are you looking at me, Captain Schulterman?” Rio says it with a certain playful lilt. Rio is not in Rainy’s chain of command, not even close, after all. But when she looks up and meets Rainy’s gaze, Rio drops the playfulness. She glances at Jenou, scribbling away in her journal with one hand, spearing a sausage on a fork with the other.

“What?” Jenou says.

“Captain wants us to take a ride with her,” Rio says. To Rainy she says, “What’s up?”

Rainy’s face is stone. Her eyes are hard. “I’ve been interviewing some POWs and DPs. I’m hearing . . . things. I have to go check it out.”

“And you need some rip-snorting killers with you?”

Rainy shakes her head, but says, “Maybe. I’m not sure.” She jerks her head. “Jeep’s over there. Finish your meal.” She walks away on stiff legs, and Rio exchanges a look with Jenou. They stand up, grab their weapons, and leave the food.

This in itself is astounding. Hot food: left on a tray! Just a few months earlier either woman would have personally shot any officer crazy enough to try to separate them from actual, cooked, hot food.

But that was winter, and it is now April. Spring. The Soviet Red Army is already in the Berlin suburbs. German troops are streaming west, trying to surrender to the Americans and British and not the Red Army: no German expects even the slightest mercy from the Russians.

The American and British armies are deep inside Germany proper, but Berlin is to be left to the Red Army. The Americans are securing the southwest, driving toward Bavarian Germany and Austria beyond.

The roads are often jammed with refugees, great masses of displaced persons, called DPs, often in rags, carrying their few possessions. But as they set out in the jeep, Rainy in the back with Jenou, Rio riding shotgun, and Corporal Rudy J. Chester—no longer “Private Sweetheart,” but a bona fide hard-core soldier with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart—drives.

Every GI has remarked on just how undamaged most of Germany is. Yes, Berlin is a smoking pile of rocks, and some of the other cities are similarly annihilated. Hamburg was burned to the ground in 1943 by a vengeful Royal Air Force. And just two months had passed since the RAF and USAAF had turned Dresden into a torch so hot that stone melted and Germans untouched by the flames and the smoke suffocated in their cellars as the firestorm consumed all oxygen.

But the farms and villages and small towns were in far better shape than the Belgian countryside, or French Normandy, or parts of Holland. And if one-tenth of the stories about Poland and Russia were true they had endured still worse. But Germany?