FEBRUARY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

et every one

Kill a hun

 

Winston Churchill

 

 

 

 

oldiers of the Red Army!

Kill the Germans!

Kill all Germans! Kill! Kill! Kill!

 

From a leaflet dropped to advancing

troops, composed by the Russian

propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg

signed by Stalin

 

 

* * * *

 

 

 

 

THREE

 

 

 

 

 

February 2, 1945, 10:15 a.m.

Aboard the U.S. Navy cruiser Quincy,

Grand Harbor

Valletta, Malta

 

 

The president squeezes his daughter’s hand.

 

“Look at Winston,” he says. “That cigar he’s smoking is so big, I can see it from here. It’s like he’s got a dog’s leg in his mouth.”

 

Anna laughs. “Oh my God, you’re right!” Three hundred yards off, aboard the British cruiser HMS Orion, the Prime Minister has shouldered his way between the white sleeves of two seamen in the long, perfect queue of swabbies gathered at the ship’s port rail. Churchill and his cheroot are spotted with ease, he is the only dark, animated blot in the line of British seamen, all arranged at motionless attention. He waves to the Quincy steaming alongside, at the President and Anna seated on the bridge.

 

Roosevelt sweeps back his blue cape, doffs his old cloth cap, and raises the hat in salute to the Prime Minister. Churchill seems to bounce on his heels in excitement. The man loves a show, thinks Roosevelt. Anna keeps laughing, her bright blue eyes like opals rolling in a palm, jumping from Churchill’s animation to her father’s face. She’s a handsome woman, Roosevelt thinks, a beautiful gal. Her voice is a song of excitement: “Isn’t this fun? Isn’t this splendid?”

 

The Quincy makes toward its berth in Valletta harbor, slipping broadside to the Orion. When the two are abreast, a flight of five RAF Spitfires in V-formation roars overhead, flying low enough for Roosevelt to see the pilots salute in their cockpits. Before the echoes of the plane engines have drained from the surrounding Malta hills, brass bands aboard both naval ships strike up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Every sailor in sight, and there are hundreds on both vessels, snaps taut to salute the American flag steaming into harbor.

 

The President leaves his hat in his lap and leans back his head to play the sun across his cheeks. The morning is warming and clear. His daughter’s hand held in his squeezes his fingers and pulls out. Anna says, “Oh, Daddy, there’s Sarah. I’m going to wave. I’ll be right back.” She goes to the rail to greet Churchill’s daughter. He watches her step away, two sailors break attention to make room for her, she’s as tall as the seamen. She goes up on tiptoe. Roosevelt guesses that all the stiff sailors around her want to look down at her legs.

 

The feel of the ship is good, old, and familiar. He grew up sailing on the lakes around Hyde Park in upstate New York. For seven years he was assistant secretary of the Navy. He feels himself stronger today than when he was in wintry Washington. The rest and relaxation of the Atlantic and now the sunny Mediterranean have restored him.

 

At the White House he’s treated like a prisoner of his health. Everywhere he turns, there it is; in the news, the Republicans keep bringing it up, in his daily routine. The topic taints everything. His “ticker” doctor, heart specialist Bruenn, takes his blood pressure every afternoon and sets him out pills. His chief physician, Admiral McIntire, comes into his bedroom each morning and watches him eat breakfast in his pajamas and read his papers, gleaning God knows what medical evidence. He’s restricted to less than four hours of concentrated work per day, including only one hour of meetings and interviews. He takes naps. Massages. Medication. Doctors creep in the folds of the White House like mice, multiplying every time there’s some setback, a stomachache, a fever, a nasal congestion. But on this voyage, the gentle roll of the ship has helped him sleep late every day, until ten or eleven. At noon, he lunched with Anna and some of his cronies. Afternoons, the President lounged on the deck, sorting stamps or reading official documents. At five came happy hour, followed by dinner and a movie.

 

On the seventh day at sea, January thirtieth, Roosevelt celebrated his sixty-third birthday. Anna threw him a party with five cakes. Three were the same size, representing the first three terms in office. The fourth cake was huge, for the current term, and the last was a little cake with a question mark of frosting in the center, for a possible fifth term. Roosevelt laughed for the sake of the crowd around him, and won all the money at poker that evening. But he worried into the night over the question mark, whether or not it was on the wrong cake. His doctors don’t tell him much. They don’t talk to anyone but each other. Roosevelt could insist they level with him, but he doesn’t ask. They have their jobs. He has his.

 

Anna returns to the deck chair beside him. “Daddy, now you listen. You are not to stay up until all hours with Winston this time. I’m watching you.”

 

He nods. She is a stunning woman, the strong cut of her jaw in profile. Eleanor has given him five beautiful children, the one girl and four boys. But very early (it seems a lifetime ago now), she stopped giving to him, or he stopped asking her for, the gifts of a wife.

 

Anna asks, as though reading his thoughts, “Daddy, just once. Couldn’t you let Mother come?”

 

Roosevelt imagines Eleanor here instead of Anna. She’d asked, as she always does, to come along. His wife is not sympathetic to his health. She believes in willpower as the path to cure yourself. With her constitution, that’s easy for her. She’s too strict, judgmental, she clashes with Winston’s alcohol, his late working hours, Winston who believes women should be silent partners. With Anna’s gaze on him the President shakes his head, no. He lays his cap back on his scalp and pulls down his cape, enfolding himself against the weather, his cool thoughts. Eleanor would cause too much of a ruckus with her presence. He doesn’t need it or want it.

 

Anna says only, “Daddy.” She purses her lips and wags her head.

 

Roosevelt looks into his daughter’s sad eyes, thinking a face, like the thickest tomes, can carry so much history.

 

On his birthday he received no wishes from Eleanor. He was instead handed a testy cable from her describing an imbroglio that had broken out in Congress over his nomination for secretary of commerce. Eleanor’s message was direct and critical of his decision.

 

Roosevelt takes in and releases a deep breath. He looks away from Anna to free the words into the air. “Your mother and I. We’re quite a pair.”

 

Anna pats his hand. In her own time, she says, “Yes, you are.”

 

He wants to soften this melancholy for his daughter. She better than anyone knows how little comfort he takes in his marriage, the other places he turns for that comfort. There’s no need to talk about it to her, she lives it.

 

“I couldn’t get along without her, you know. She’s irreplaceable. She’s my eyes and ears. Hell, she’s my legs.”

 

Anna lowers her chin and her eyelids in an elegiac, understanding expression. She drops her head to his shoulder, smoothing the front of his old heavy cape with a strong, veined hand. Her touch on his chest is all he senses; the naval bands, the ships’ engines, the rustle of men and sea all step back behind the closeness of his nestled daughter on this warship in a foreign port. So much history in a touch.

 

Roosevelt sits with Anna while the ceremony surges and concludes. Father and daughter do not move or disconnect. Nearing the quay, the Quincy slides beyond the Orion, Churchill and his sailors are out of sight. The British brass band fades. The Spitfires bank and return to their base. Roosevelt feels his daughter trying to give to him through her body, her strength and love, her life hooked to his, though he’s aware it does no good; he bites his lip. It’s too late for so many things. Too late.

 

But perhaps not for everything.

 

The legacy.

 

Is there still time and energy left? Or is there only the bitter question mark on the sweet cake?

 

“Well,” he says. This is a preamble to movement, to get on with events. But Anna does not release him. Roosevelt relents. He stays in her embrace, her head on his shoulder like an angel there. They sit a long while, until the big boat is in dock, until Winston Churchill comes chugging up the gangway. Before he has both feet on the deck, the Prime Minister calls forth.

 

“Mr. President. My excellent friend. Ha! Ha! You made it in grand fashion, sir. Grand! Anna! My God, Franklin, you do travel with the most beautiful women. Look who’s here, Anna. Sarah!”

 

Behind Churchill, his daughter Sarah hurries forward. Anna makes to stand to face this barrage of guests and British spunk. But it is Roosevelt who pulls on her hand, just for another moment to keep her in the nest the two of them made for a few perfect minutes. He’s not ready for her to flap out, or to fly off himself. If only there were more time, for everything. Father and daughter fix eyes, and in this shared glance—miraculously somehow—all the good and awful and hidden and feared in his heart is said to her. This is more than he expected, this sudden communication. Here, of all places, now, this goodbye. He can, he must, let her go. Winston barges forth. Roosevelt presses his child’s fingers for one more selfish second; let Winston wait.

 

As though releasing a dove, he opens his hands and off she flies, white and strong and gone.

 

In her place, round and blocking the sight of her, stand the gold buttons, cream braid, and blue naval jacket of Churchill. The man adores playing dress-up, especially uniforms. He wears an admiral’s cap.

 

Roosevelt opens his hands to the Prime Minister.

 

“Winston, you are, as always ...”

 

“Hungry, Mr. President.” Churchill plops into Anna’s deck chair.”Hungry. When is lunch, sir?”

 

Roosevelt can’t help but be buoyed by the spirit of the man’s arrival.

 

“Lunch always awaits you, Winston. Now that you’re here, let’s put on the feedbag.”

 

“The feedbag.” Churchill mulches this word, taps his cane. “I do love the American way with the tongue. The feedbag. Marvelous.”

 

The two leaders share quick laughter. Their eyes meet, and the mirth is doused. Their two looks are identical, appraising and secretive. Roosevelt wonders if his own appearance is as worn as Churchill’s. The Prime Minister seems frail, the weight in his face and shoulders has a soft and soggy sag. His cheeks, always ruddy, are pale today, his high forehead seems chalky. During the war Churchill has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, to the front, to Moscow and Washington several times, to constant conferences with Eisenhower and Montgomery at their headquarters. He’s all over the place, he strolls London and the cities after every bombing, thumbs up, V for Victory, “KBO.” He’s the oldest of the three Allied leaders, seventy. He’s got to be tired. But right now Winston Churchill speaks of lunch as though it will be a coronation, of the President’s arrival in Malta as a great and propitious event. Roosevelt thinks, This is real courage, this man. My God.

 

Lunch is filled with chatter between the two families and key staffs. No mention is made of the Montgomery gaffe or Churchill’s humble and marvelous speech in the House of Commons. Roosevelt thinks it best to let those sleeping dogs lie. He relishes the ninety-minute meal, flush with charm and gossip, and draws from those at the table their own wits and best habits. Roosevelt wants to be held by this company as a brave man, no less than his admired friend Winston.

 

Churchill drinks champagne as though he is putting out a fire in his gut. Food goes in, words fly out, he’s a locomotive, shoveling in fuel, producing speed. Roosevelt marvels but holds court despite the Prime Minister’s blanketing charm.

 

“That’s enough,” says Anna, standing at her place. She claps her hands once. “Everyone go home. Father and Winston need their rest. Big days ahead, everyone, big days. Let’s conserve ourselves, shall we?”

 

Churchill rises, his party of a dozen follows his lead. He leans over to Roosevelt, and behind a raised hand says, “Six o’clock all right? I’ll come to your cabin. We can talk an hour before dinner.”

 

Roosevelt tips a lit cigarette in agreement. Churchill turns and raises his hands like a man being taken prisoner to Anna’s dictate, saying, “I shall go quietly, madam.”

 

When all are gone, Anna herself wheels Roosevelt to his cabin. “Nap,” she says on the way. “Whew, I think I’ll take one myself. Hurricane Winston.”

 

At six o’clock sharp, the Prime Minister raps on Roosevelt’s cabin door.

 

“Come in, Winston.”

 

Churchill enters with a different energy from how he came aboard that afternoon. This is the private Winston, not the roaring electric personality but a calm presence, almost graceful. Roosevelt sees the intellect palpable in the man’s eyes. His words at these times are not chosen for display but for reason and clarity.

 

“Since we only have an hour before your lovely daughter comes to drum in my head, let me jump right in, Franklin, about the meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

 

Roosevelt lights a cigarette, places it in his holder, and folds his hands in his lap.

 

“Proceed, Mr. Prime Minister “

 

In succinct terms, Churchill describes the results of the military conference held over the past several days here in Malta between the military staffs of General Marshall and his British counterpart General Brooke.

 

The American and British forces are to put their major efforts into two converging thrusts toward the Rhine, in the hopes of trapping a large number of German troops west of the river. The main drive across the river, deep into Germany, will be made by Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army, across the Lower Rhine, skirting north of the industrial Ruhr region. Churchill calls this route “the shortest road to Berlin.” In the south, American forces are to cross the Rhine and head toward Frankfurt, to draw off as many enemy troops as possible from Monty’s advance. This line of attack could become the focus if Montgomery falters in the north. Marshall and Brooke concurred that Montgomery’s army will be reinforced for this assault, with top priority in men, air support, supplies, and equipment. The Field Marshal will have under his command a million soldiers, including the U.S. Ninth Army.

 

In the telling, Churchill appears pepped, pleased. He’s at least temporarily salvaged his dream of sending British troops to the forefront of the war’s endgame. The quest for Berlin is alive and Monty is at the crest of the race. While Churchill explains, Roosevelt nods, “Yes, yes.” Listening, he’s surprised that the Prime Minister has won these concessions for Montgomery, after hearing all the brouhaha in the past few weeks over the Field Marshal’s stupid press conference. But if General Marshall figures it’s okay, then Ike must be okay with it. Churchill’s speech in Parliament must have saved the day. Looks like everyone’s kissed and made up.

 

Berlin and Montgomery. This is what happens when Winston attends a meeting without the President or Stalin around. He gets everything he wants.

 

Still, the military men know their stuff. Berlin would be a prize, no question.

 

Joe would shit, no question either.

 

We’ll have to see.

 

Churchill concludes, “Berlin is open, Franklin. Not just militarily, but politically. To my knowledge there’ve been no discussions between you, me, or Stalin about it. We can move on the city. We’re poised to. We have to. We can’t sit back and let the Russians occupy every bit of ground between Moscow and Brussels.”

 

“No, I suppose not.”

 

“No. Definitely not.”

 

“Whoever gets there first, then.”

 

“That’s correct. I’m convinced we have to shake hands with the Communists as far to the east as possible.”

 

“Yes, yes.”

 

“We must take Berlin. Stalin only respects strength. Not agreements or morality. I assure you, there’s no other way to pry him out of the rest of eastern Europe. Strength, sir.”

 

“Yes.”

 

The Prime Minister pauses, ready to say more, always it seems he is ready for that. But he eases back, he’s made his case for now. Like Anna and Hopkins and Roosevelt’s closest staff members, Churchill has developed the sense to know when the President has heard enough.

 

Churchill draws a cigar from his breast pocket, the thing is the size and color of a gun barrel. He asks, “Franklin, tell me honestly. How are you feeling?”

 

“Honestly?”

 

“Always.”

 

“Every new day is an adventure. Everyone around me worries. I don’t keep them around if they don’t worry. Mostly I haven’t got the time to do it for myself.”

 

Churchill nibbles off the end of the cigar. Beside his chair is a lighted candle, put there by Roosevelt for the Prime Minister’s purpose. Roosevelt watches his friend, his fellow world leader, work the flame around the orb of the cigar’s tip. When it is glowing and aromatic, Churchill breathes in the tobacco. He licks his lips and holds in the smoke. Roosevelt studies this man, a portrait in powerful contradictions. Of British humor, style, and backbone. Crass and brilliant.

 

Churchill speaks in smoke. “We have profound work ahead of us, Franklin.”

 

“Yes, we do.”

 

“It can be done without us, of course.”

 

The cloud released by the Prime Minister hovers over his head, shifting its coils in the breezeless stateroom. Under the haze, Churchill, pedestaled on his belly and short legs, looks to Roosevelt like a Buddha, some fortune-teller come with a grim message. He’s talking about dying. Roosevelt answers from a page out of Eleanor’s book, willpower.

 

“I’d rather it not be, Winston. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”

 

Churchill does not make the obligatory reply that Roosevelt expects, the quick assurance that of course all will be well. Churchill sits under his smoke, puffs another billow into it. Roosevelt wants him to speak; damn it, man, say something. The Prime Minister nods, as though he heard this thought. But the cigar glows and smolders in his grasp, and that is all he says. Roosevelt realizes, as he did this tender morning with his daughter; as he did the night of his birthday party on the Atlantic, alone in his rocking bed with the question mark like Damocles’ sword over his head; as he has guessed from the postures of his doctors, a suspicion that seeps out of their closed meetings the way a smell creeps out of a sickroom. Churchill tonight is saying goodbye.

 

Roosevelt looks at the fortunate man across from him, who will be here to witness and guide the end, and most important, the new beginning.

 

“Franklin.”

 

“Yes, Winston?”

 

Churchill rolls the cigar over on his lips. He takes a puff, then removes it; the cigar is so fat, his fingers are spread wide in an inadvertent V for Victory. He pokes out his lower lip and cocks his head. Churchill resembles a very thoughtful bulldog.

 

“Yes, Winston?”

 

The Prime Minister jumps to his feet. Roosevelt envies this too.

 

“I’m famished.”

 

~ * ~

 

 

 

February 2, 1945, 10:10 a.m.

Regensburger Strasse

Wilmersdorf, Berlin

 

 

the ticking stops.

 

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lottie says aloud in her flat to no one, “leave us alone.”

 

She crosses the room slump-shouldered and folds into the chair beside the radio. The box is large, of polished brown wood, with black plastic knobs and a gold lamé mouth. The Drahtfunk, the constant, steady ticking on a special frequency that tells Berliners there are no enemy bombers over Germany, has stopped.

 

Lottie pulls her knees up on the chair, she wraps her arms around them and buries her face.

 

Where are the Americans headed this time? It’s been several weeks since there was a raid on Berlin. Lottie recalls what she has seen, what every German has seen by now.

 

It’s awful, she thinks. Too awful. She makes herself hum something in the little cave of her knees and wrists.

 

After seconds of silence, the radio emits a pinging sound, foretelling an imminent air raid.

 

Lottie’s forehead goes limp on her knees.

 

Leave us alone.

 

An announcer comes on the radio. The woman is calm, official in her tone. Air defense reports that a large formation of Allied bombers has crossed the frontier this morning and is headed in an easterly direction. The target is as yet unknown. Stay tuned.

 

“Ahhhh!” Lottie stands from the chair. She casts her eyes around her flat, her walls, an identity that has lasted this long. Here she is singular, not a refugee, not one of the unfortunates. In these rooms is where she maintains her hold on the young woman Lottie. In a war-ravaged city, with lunacy roaming the streets, sanity is the greatest challenge, after survival.

 

Her swinging gaze is growing edgy, jumping from thing to place like a bird frightened by the pinging radio. She puts out her hands as though to fend off a collision. She falls back into the chair, her balance stolen for the moment.

 

Her only companion, the radio, is rankling, pinging while the officials observe and calculate the American bombers’ course. Lottie’s breath speeds in her breast. Saliva cloys in her mouth. The walls, her guardians, seem to advance on her, bringing to her seat by the radio her framed pictures, her memories, the absorbed sounds of her solitary tears. The Galiano cello standing in its case, like Charlie Chaplin wide at the bottom, narrow to the top, waddles from its corner.

 

Lottie stands again. The walls and cello halt their march, they skitter back in place while she stares at them. She runs a hand through her hair.

 

“That’s enough,” she says. “Quite enough.”

 

She goes into the small kitchen and opens a cabinet. She takes out a tiny bundle wrapped in paper.

 

This is the last of it.

 

Lottie unties the string and pours the final grains of real ground coffee bean onto a filter.

 

This is the last filter too.

 

From a bucket on the counter she dips two cups of water. This morning, like every morning, she and her neighbors lugged their buckets up the stairs after filling them from a broken water main in a crater behind their building.

 

She tosses the emptied package into the wastebasket. She was given the coffee months ago, before a private performance of her string quartet at a big house out in Potsdam. The host, a Nazi colonel, presented her the parcel with a pinch on the cheek. Lottie saw the man surrounded by his family, lacy daughters and fat wife, his friends and fellow black-shirted officers. She did not wonder what the man’s hand squeezing her flesh might have done in the war. Lottie knows what little good choosing sides has done anyone. She took the impertinence and the coffee, and she played.

 

When the kettle is prepared, she lights her spirit lamp. The many little flames jet out in curves under the pot. The smell of the fuel flowers the entire room, it is the last of her eau de cologne.

 

Lottie sits by the lamp, cup in hand. She has no cream or sugar. She doesn’t even want a cup of coffee very much. What she does desire, and will have in another minute, is one tiny scene of normalcy. A hot drink in her flat. Why save the coffee, or the perfume? she asks. Save it all for when, tomorrow? Tomorrow—if there is one—she will only ask again, Why save it? For tomorrow?

 

The coffee boils beneath her gaze. She pours it steaming into the cup, then folds her palms around it. She breathes in the coffee smell, redolent of luxury, a proper place and time.

 

The radio pinging continues. Lottie snaps it off.

 

Enough.

 

She spreads her knees to straddle the burning lamp. She does not douse the lamp, but lets the flames live a while longer, lets them waste themselves into the cold air, sets them loose. Between her legs, between her palms, the warmth is fine.

 

Outside, sudden sirens surge across the city. Lottie takes a sip. Only a taste; she gasps behind the swallow, it is lovely.

 

Beyond her door in the hallway, frantic footsteps begin to scramble down the stairs. Lottie listens, seated, sipping. One of her neighbor women pauses long enough to bang on her door. “Are you in? Hello?”

 

Lottie makes no answer. The knocking goes one more round, then stops. The neighbor joins the noisy traffic to the cellar. Lottie hears suitcases bumping on the treads, babies handed ahead, children urged from behind to keep moving, let’s go, schnell!

 

Another knock on the door. Lottie takes another sip. The coffee cools fast. The spirit lamp coughs in its hiss, the perfume is almost gone.

 

“Lottie!”

 

She recognizes the voice at the door, the landlady, old Mrs. Preutzmann from the first floor.

 

“Lottie! You must come, Liebling! I saw you go in, I know you’re home! Come on!”

 

Lottie rubs the ceramic mug against her cheek, flushing from it the last throb of warmth.

 

She says to the door, “I’m having coffee.”

 

The landlady shouts, ”Lottie, the cellar!”

 

Lottie holds the cup to her heart.

 

“Lottie! The radio says it’s Luftgefahr fifteen. Fifteen!”

 

This is the highest degree of danger. It means the radio has announced that Berlin is the target.

 

“Liebling!”

 

Lottie sets the mug on her lap. The lamp stutters.

 

She says in a voice sure to be heard in the hall, “Leave me alone.”

 

“Are you coming? Lottie?”

 

“I’m having coffee.”

 

“Ach! What? That’s ridiculous. Get to the cellar.”

 

Lottie stands too fast. Some of the coffee spills on her shin.

 

She screeches, “I’m having coffee!”

 

Lottie sinks back into the chair. The quiet radio gawks at her, golden open mouth.

 

Mrs. Preutzmann backs away from the door. Down the stairwell, Lottie hears her shout, “Hans! Hans! Come up here, bring the keys! Yes, up here now!”

 

Out in the city the air raid sirens caterwaul. Mrs. Preutzmann yelps for her old husband to fetch the keys to pry Lottie out of her flat. The radio wants to join in but Lottie has shut it up. The walls want to start their inch forward again but Lottie glares them rigid. Her cello says, Whatever you think best, Lottie.

 

“Oh, let’s go down to the damn cellar.”

 

She tows the big cello case to the door just as Mr. Preutzmann, jingling like a nervous Santa Claus, turns the lock and steps into the flat. His wife stands in the emptied hall, determined, fists on hips.

 

Lottie issues the old woman a wan smile. To the husband, she nods. “Thank you. I was sound asleep.”

 

“Let me help you with that,” he says, but Lottie handles the cello on her own down the steps to the cellar.

 

Mr. and Mrs. Preutzmann and Lottie are the last in the basement. The old landlord slams shut the wooden door behind him, then clomps down the oaken steps. He’s a burly man with an ample, chubby midsection. His hands and shoulders are thick from years spent maintaining this building and the one next door. The Nazis will come for him soon enough, thinks Lottie. He’ll be yanked into the Volkssturm and pissy little Mrs. Preutzmann will be left to the Russians.

 

Thirteen people fill the cellar; all but the landlord are women. Hungry war. The main course is men. Women are dessert. Children, a candy.

 

One naked electric bulb hangs cockeyed from the ceiling. The cellar’s roof is the bottom of the first-floor flat, heavy wooden beams and the rough undersides of floorboards. Mr. Preutzmann has brought down water buckets and a halved fifty-gallon drum for a privy. The walls are stacked with sandbags. He has shored up the beams with scrap metal scavenged from the rubble everywhere in the city. Beneath the bench where he and the landlady sit are a pickax and a shovel. All the women have wet towels tucked around their necks. In case of smoke or a gas explosion, they will pull them up over their noses like bandannas. Several of the women hold hands. Mr. Preutzmann crosses his arms over his meaty chest.

 

Precautions, Lottie thinks, chaff in the wind. Good luck charms are all they’ve gathered around themselves down here, not security.

 

“I didn’t hear the radio,” a second-floor woman says. “Are we sure it was fifteen?”

 

“I heard the radio,” Mrs. Preutzmann snipes. “It’s fifteen. It’s Berlin.”

 

Together they sit, tense and waiting, staring down at the floor as though a bomb were right there fizzling in the middle of their circle. Lottie’s cello case lies at her feet, the size of a small, extra person, someone who has fainted. They do their duty, these good Prussians, the duty Hitler has chosen for them. They sit beneath the Allies’ bombs.

 

Lottie is certain that each one in the cellar dwells on the same thought. Run away. But run where? It’s a lottery out there in the shattering morn. You might run towards death just as surely as away from it. Who knows? Best to sit still. This building has been hit twice before, it’s still standing, lightning never strikes thrice, yes? Take your chances here.

 

They picture particular deaths, the ones that can reach them down here in the flimsy cocoon of their basement, the types of death they’ve all witnessed in Berlin. The ghastly end from a direct hit on the cellar by a burrowing bomb, the shell that crashes right through the building’s roof and continues until it hits bottom. Death by a time-release bomb, exploding hours after you’ve ignored it as a dud. Death by phosphorus bombs, the white-hot spray that melts flesh to the bone. One dot will drill a hole into you inches deep and torch the building above your head. Death by crushing or suffocation when your building collapses over your cellar. By gas, when a bomb only partially explodes and instead of shrapnel releases a toxic, invisible seepage (these are the saddest-looking corpses, they are pristine, smothered, shocked to be dead). Or by concussion, where the pressure from a blast bursts every sac in your body, your ears, lungs, organs.

 

Thirteen people breathe and huddle. In Berlin, like a gavel announcing court, rumbles the first explosion.

 

Now the sounds of battle begin to unfurl. Antiaircraft gunnery chatters from the concrete flak towers around the city. Faraway thumps of bombs come in quick clusters, foom foom foom foom! A worse sign: Lottie hears the massed buzzing of American B-17 bombers. The Amis are dense over the city. This is a major raid.

 

The floorboards shudder. A shower of dust lands on their heads. The lightbulb flicks off. The women take sharp breaths. The bulb comes back. The women tuck their towels tighter. Mr. Preutzmann spits and does not uncross his arms. He mutters, “Schweine.”

 

Behind Lottie the wall shakes, nudging her. She reaches down to her cello case. She lifts it and wraps it in her arms.

 

More explosions sound deep in the earth, closer on all sides of them. The sense is of being underwater, of being hunted by some sea monster that swims in the dark waters unseen, bearing down, tasting the ocean for you.

 

Foom, foom, foom, FOOM! The last report comes from somewhere scarify near. Lottie jerks, rattling the handle on her cello case. Dust sifts out of the floorboards with every shiver of the ground. Eyes are pinched shut in the cellar. Hands in hands are veined with the effort of squeezing. Mr. Preutzmann uncrosses his arms now and finds the hand of his wife.

 

A moment of silence descends. Lottie in her mind enters the sky with the bomber pilots. The first wave of planes has passed the target. They’ve dropped their loads, taken their hits from the guns below, and banked for home. The second flight of planes follows close on their heels.

 

The bombardiers zero in on the fires already started beneath them in Wilmersdorf.

 

It’s easy.

 

In the cellar, Lottie wraps her legs and arms around the Galiano. She cannot protect it, she is not hard enough, only a soft human.

 

Another explosion somewhere in the depths. The monster closes.

 

Another. Foom!

 

Another.

 

The lightbulb flashes and leaves them.

 

Mr. Preutzmann curses again.

 

Lottie licks her lips. There is the savor of real coffee there.

 

She thinks, That was the last of it.

 

She closes her eyes. The cello case is against her cheek, cool and dear.

 

The last of it.

 

FUH-WOOOM!!

 

Lottie’s eardrums are rammed inward. Her mouth flies open in a reflex of pain.

 

The world comes uprooted. The cellar jumps, spilling everyone onto the floor. The air is clotted with dust and smoke, splinters hail from the floorboards. Some sandbags have burst, grains bleed out.

 

Lottie lies deafened under a jumble of arms and legs and luggage. Her cello is still in her arms, she has saved it. There is dirt on her lips; the coffee is gone. The people in the ruck scramble as best they can to arrange themselves. In the confusion she notices there is light again. Did the bulb come back?

 

She looks up when a knee is taken from her head. No, there is no light-bulb anymore. There is a hole in the ceiling. Through the opening, the flat above is awash in flames.

 

Lottie’s heart sinks. Her building, her home, on fire.

 

She cannot rise from the floor, one person is still heavy across her back. She waits a second for whoever it is to gather herself and rise. When she does not move, Lottie kicks.

 

“No, no!” Lottie’s ears are stunned, the voice seems far off. It is Mr. Preutzmann, coated in white dust like a baker, blurting. The man scoops his beefy hands under the armpits of the woman on top, then lifts Lottie to her feet, and bends again for the cello. The woman who had splayed across Lottie’s back is on the floor, face up, but without a whole face. Beside her lies one of the floor joists, swooped from its place, bloody and guilty. The woman is not one known well to the rest in the cellar, she was a displaced person assigned last week to their building. Lottie cannot hear all the syllables when someone says the woman’s name, Frau Something.

 

Lottie wants to shudder at the sight of this stranger’s death, the proximity of it, but she can’t out of relief that it was not her own fate. She doesn’t reproach herself for this; she sees the thin gruel of horror and gladness in the others’ faces too, even the neighbor who knew the lady’s name.

 

The floorboards crackle. Lottie wants to see how bad the fire is. Maybe it hasn’t spread upstairs yet, maybe her flat is all right. She moves with Mr. Preutzmann beneath the hole and glances up. The entire first floor is being consumed. A wind whips through the rooms, the flames inhale through busted windows. The blaze splashes here and there as though on the tip of a painter’s brush. Upholstery ignites, carpets and white curtains drink flame like wicks. The Preutzmanns’ flat is volcanic; the conflagration takes only seconds to consume everything while Lottie and the owner watch. Sparks rain into the basement. Lottie stares in disbelief. Her flat. Her sanctuary.

 

Mr. Preutzmann pulls her away. The hole is the mouth of a furnace.

 

The building’s residents cluster around Mr. Preutzmann, the only man among them. The same expression sits on all their flickering faces. They are homeless. Shocked. The war has come knocking, hard. The woman’s body with the staved head reminds them that death—war’s mate—is here too.

 

Mr. Preutzmann looks at them, stymied. His building above is burning, it’s going to crash down on them. Or it will first consume all their oxygen. The wooden steps to the cellar are already on fire. Even if they weren’t, who would climb them into that?

 

Lottie says, “Mr. Preutzmann, we’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

 

The landlord stands mum, ghostly in his coating of white dust. He runs his hands over his face. His sweating palms wipe clean swaths, now he looks striped.

 

Another woman prods, “Mr. Preutzmann? What are we going to do?”

 

When he makes no reply, panic sends out shoots. The women bunch closer around the big landlord. The man backs away from them, until he is against a wall.

 

“Do something,” they insist. “We’re going to die down here. You see? Do something!” Lottie does not take her hands from her Galiano. She drags it with her toward Mr. Preutzmann. It too must get out.

 

She crowds the landlord with the other ladies. She resents them their presence in the basement, where they will die along with Lottie. Her life will end down here and people will say, “What a shame, thirteen people were killed in that building.” Instead, she wants them to cry out, “Oh! Lottie the cellist died there!” She’s afraid to be subsumed in their number, divided to one-thirteenth. Her life mustn’t be robbed of its singularity.

 

Mrs. Preutzmann shouts over the pressing women. “Hans!”

 

Lottie turns her attention when Mr. Preutzmann does. His wife stands at the far wall, behind the corpse. Mrs. Preutzmann holds the pickax.

 

She shouts to her husband, to all of them. “Next door! The building next door! It has a basement just like this. Right behind this wall!”

 

A bolt goes through Mr. Preutzmann. He stands firmer. The women step away to make room for him.”We can dig to it!” he calls to his wife, advancing. “We can get out that way!” He says this as though the idea is his. The landlady nods, yes, yes, yes! and waves him to come faster.

 

Several of the women hurry to the far wall with him, patting him on the back, uttering encouragement. They slide the dead woman out of his way, then stand aside while he takes the first whack with the pickax. Brick bits skitter across the floor. The dent Mr. Preutzmann made in the wall is no more than a chink.

 

Upstairs something heavy falls, a chandelier perhaps. A howl skates across the fiery opening, a splitting sound.

 

Mr. Preutzmann spits in his hands. He takes a full swing. The pick sticks in the wall. When he levers it out, several bricks tumble broken at his feet.

 

In one minute of intense labor the landlord has broken through a fist-sized aperture into the next cellar. The wall between basements is three layers thick. The pick droops in Mr. Preutzmann’s mitts. He is exhausted.

 

Lottie looks over her shoulder. The first five treads of the wooden staircase have caught fire. It’s as though the flames are walking down the steps to get to them. Lottie leans her cello case into the hands of the woman beside her. She strides forward and reaches for the pick from the landlord. He shakes his head, no, just give me a moment. Lottie takes the tool from him. She is a cellist, with athletic shoulders and long, strong hands. She is more than merely one of thirteen.

 

The pick is heavier than she imagined. But she is sturdier, less clumsy than she thought she would be with her first clout against the wall. Bricks spew under her onslaught. She attacks the wall ten, fifteen swings. Lottie descends into a mindless fury, banging, banging, twenty swings. She grunts. Mr. Preutzmann and the others watch. Then someone cheers. Lottie senses performance. Through the heat and smoke, the clang of the blade and bricks, this emboldens her. She’s the youngest one in the cellar, the most beautiful and talented. They will all live because they are with her. Lottie rescues them. That’s what they’ll say.

 

She reaches her limit. Her shoulders and back ache. She pauses to take a breather before she continues. In that still moment, the pain in her hands scales up her arms and overwhelms her. The pickax slips from her numb fingers. The handle is slick and red. Her knees are rubbery; Mrs. Preutzmann steps up and supports her. Blisters have burst in both of Lottie’s palms. She is disappointed to be so frail. A pick handle is not a cello, it seems. A rescue is not so simple a thing.

 

Behind them, the entire staircase smashes down, charred from its mooring. Everyone jerks and cringes. Now the fire, like death, lies close at their feet.

 

In desperation, the women as one assault the wall. They claw at it like trapped rats, with the shovel and pick, with blackened shards of the disintegrating building that drop through the hole at their backs, even ripping their own nails and hands. Beneath the hole a pyre of burning debris forms on the floor. Smoke begins to sour in Lottie’s lungs. A woman takes the damp towel from around her throat and swabs Lottie’s hands.

 

Mr. Preutzmann holds the cello case while the women tear at the wall. Within minutes the hole is made the size of a rain barrel. One woman crawls through, landing roughly on the floor in the adjacent basement. She rises, almost laughing. She reaches back for the next in line. Together the eleven remaining women help each other to safety. Lottie is last.

 

Once through, she unravels her hands from the towel and reaches back for her Galiano. Mr. Preutzmann is not there with it. Lottie cries out for him.

 

In a moment he fills the hole. It is not her cello the landlord pushes through the opening but the body of the poor woman. Mrs. Preutzmann muscles Lottie aside, screaming through the wall, “Hans! What are you doing? Come through! Put her down! Hans!”

 

“Take her!” the landlord demands. “Take her. We can’t leave her in here!”

 

Some of the women have already scurried up the stairs to flee this cellar for the street. Three of them who have stayed behind push past Mrs. Preutzmann. They reach their arms into the opening. With effort, they pull the limp form through, bumping her on the sharp edges of the bricks. The corpse is shunted up the steps by the last of the women. All have gone now except Lottie, the landlady, and her husband. No one knows how long it will be until this building too is ablaze. Lottie thinks it’s on fire right now. The basement was empty when they broke through; that’s not a good sign. They must get out, all of them, immediately.

 

The wife shouts again, ”Hans! Come!”

 

Lottie shoves her head into the cavity.

 

“My cello! Please! Mr. Preutzmann!”

 

The landlord whirls for the hard shell case. He rams it into the hole. But the bottom of the case is too broad. It jams and will not come through.

 

Lottie gasps.

 

The landlady points at her husband. “Leave the damn thing! Hans!”

 

Lottie watches though the hole. The basement behind the landlord fills with dripping fire. Flaming floorboards break and dangle, they loll like burning tongues. The inferno on the fallen staircase is in full bloom. The big man sets the Galiano on the floor. He takes up the pick, yelling, “Get back!”

 

Mr. Preutzmann winds up and takes a swing. His strength has returned. More bits of brick ricochet and scatter. The hole needs only to be enlarged a few inches.

 

After a half-dozen blows, the landlord drops the tool. Lottie rushes forward while he wriggles her cello case through the cavity. She leaves crimson prints on its length, her hands flare gripping her cello as though the flames are in her flesh.

 

She looks through the hole. Mr. Preutzmann stands erect. His face is flushed. He’s satisfied, he’s done his job as landlord, and a man. He puffs his cheeks, as though to snuff out a candle.

 

His wife sticks her head in beside Lottie.

 

“Hans.”

 

Lottie senses a rumble in the wall and floor. Her dread rises fast. She opens her lips to yell to Mr. Preutzmann but her mouth is stopped by a gigantic and invisible hand swatting her and the landlady backward from the hole. Their feet lift from the shaking floor, a gale of furious, scalding wind flings them backward across the room, unleashed by the collapsing building. Lottie clings to the cello in the dusty air on the cusp of the blast.

 

Blinking, Lottie sits up. Her eyes are baked dry in their sockets. The back of her head will have a lump. Her cello is beside her. Mrs. Preutzmann has been blown to the other side of the room and sprawls moaning in a thicket of debris, a new widow. Wood and twisted metal fill the hole, sticking out of it like broken bones.

 

Lottie is stunned. Every part of her sears. She has cuts on her legs and arms. She wobbles to her feet. She lifts her cello. The ground looks very far off; she seems to stand on top of some tall mound, a pyramid of events molded out of the last several terrible seconds, stacked so high under her she is dizzied. She does not shake her head to clear her mind. She wants to stay muddled right now, swaddled in the bafflement. There’s too much.

 

Lottie is blank.

 

One notion only.

 

Get out.

 

She hesitates to take a step, afraid she will tumble from the peak. She might not get up if that happens. She stumbles to Mrs. Preutzmann.

 

Must get out.

 

Teetering over the prone landlady, Lottie does not know what to do to wake the woman. She appears to be a long way down. In these seconds another single thought bubbles up through the miasma. It floats beside her, outside her. She doesn’t want the thought, doesn’t want to be sensate. But she cannot chase it away, she can’t hide from it on the blurred mountain of events. Lottie closes her eyes. She feels herself swaying. The thought enters her.

 

That was the last of it.

 

The last of it.

 

~ * ~

 

 

 

February 5, 1945, 1:30 p.m.

The Hürtgen Forest, near the Belgian border

Germany

 

 

the driver asks, “sir?”

 

Bandy looks at the corporal behind the wheel of the jeep. He’s been bumping along with this assigned courier for fifteen minutes out of Aachen and the lad hasn’t said a word until now. Bandy likes this. It’s a country way. You don’t always have to be flapping off about something.

 

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’”

 

The boy, rawboned and freckled, speaks without taking his eyes from the rutted mud road. The steering wheel jumps a lot in his thin hands. His knuckles are pink. His knees are up almost to his chest, he’s tall.

 

“They told me you was a captain.”

 

“I am and I’m not. All civilian war photographers get that rank. But it doesn’t mean anything. Just unless we’re captured. Then all of a sudden we’re officers.”

 

Bandy sees in profile the boy smiling. “That sounds dumb, don’t it?”

 

Bandy agrees. “FUBAR.”

 

The jeep tires cut hard to the left in the muck. The soldier, maybe nineteen, fights the wheel, straightens the car. Bandy resists the urge to drive, but the boy is serious, he’s doing his best.

 

“Are you the Charles Bandy?”

 

Bandy grins. He has no advantage with a camera over other photographers. If there’s action in front of you, you snap it. You send the film through the censors to the photo pool, then it goes home. You hope it gets in print. All of them out here in Europe and in the Pacific have the same crapshoot. Bandy has just one edge on the competition. His name. And the title behind it, life special correspondent. He’s famous.

 

“Yes, I reckon I am. And you are?”

 

The boy hesitates. He steals a quick glimpse at his passenger.

 

“You interviewing me?”

 

“I just take pictures, son. No, I’m not interviewing you.”

 

The soldier nods. “Stewie.”The boy waits until he reaches a smooth enough plot in the road to handle the steering wheel with one mitt. He flashes the free hand to Bandy for a quick shake. “Stewie Stewart. Pleased.”

 

“Same, Stewie. Where you from?”

 

“California. Outside Stockton.”

 

“Cattle?”

 

“Horses. Quarter horses.”

 

“You play ball? You look like you did.”

 

“Yeah. You can tell, huh? In high school. You?”

 

“Naw.”

 

Most of the snow has melted along this ridge, leaving the trail soupy. The road approaches a sharp turn along the lip of a gorge. The tendons in Stewie’s wrists work like guy wires behind his fingers. The conversation drops. In the heavy woods below Bandy’s shoulder in the open jeep, an abandoned tank and a few trucks are spilled on their sides. They did not negotiate these slippery curves. Bandy pulls his camera bag into his lap, in the event that Stewie doesn’t either and he has to jump.

 

Bandy says nothing. He could reanimate the talk, share what he knows about horses and basketball, which isn’t much. He could be famous for tall, skinny, far-from-home Stewie Stewart, give him something to write his folks about. The corporal seems like a nice kid. But Bandy decides to leave it. Stewie’s a soldier, yes, but not a combatant. Bandy doesn’t want to hear about Stockton.

 

All around him is the dreaded Hürtgen, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire war. It’s good that Stewie has taken the cue and stayed quiet again, for Bandy plays God in his head and brings the battle alive. He watches ghost soldiers run and dive, hears trees explode, aims his mind’s camera into the recent past. From September to December of last year, Hodges’ First Army tried to penetrate the Hürtgen Forest to reach the Roer River running down its eastern edge. This is the thickest wood Bandy can imagine. Not in Tennessee or the North Carolina Smokies is there a forest like this. The fir trees are dense with low branches. A man couldn’t walk upright among them. Even on a bright day like today, the sun never touches the forest floor, so it stays dark and damp, with no covering underbrush. It’s a forest out of a scary fairy tale. And through the heart of it, like a black knight, runs the stolid Siegfried Line. The Hürtgen is the worst place Bandy has ever seen for a man to go if someone is waiting in there to kill him.

 

Why did the generals want to take on the Germans in here?

 

The Roer River. It’s the last natural barrier before the Rhine. First Army had the task of capturing the dams on the Roer, to stop the Germans from blowing them and flooding the Ruhr valley. With the dams safe, the river could be crossed quickly But if the Germans kept the dams, they’d be able to flood the valley and the Allied advance would be halted until the waters receded. That would give the enemy more time to prepare for the final onslaught, and cost more Allied lives.

 

The journalists have all heard the grumblings. In September, First Army could have assaulted the Roer dams from the south. The Hürtgen could have been bypassed. The forest without the dams is useless. The dams without the forest should have been the goal. But the generals wanted the Hürtgen cleared of enemy before they headed for the Roer. The forest would be in the rear of Montgomery’s precious northern thrust to Berlin. So they went in.

 

And the Hürtgen chewed up men. First Army crept in there and came limping out, gut shot. In ninety days of fighting the casualty rate was extraordinary, almost twenty-five thousand battle losses. Whole divisions were decimated. The Americans got a bad and bloody reversal.

 

Now, two months later, the Germans have retreated out of the Hürtgen. They still hold the dams. The current plan is for First Army to advance again through the forest, as well as through a corridor in the southeast. They’ll breach the Siegfried Line and attack the dams. Once they’ve been captured, Ninth Army and Montgomery’s British and Canadian forces can cross the Roer and close to the Rhine, protecting each other’s flanks. Beyond the Rhine there’s nothing but flatland and villages all the way to the Elbe River and on to Berlin. The race for the German capital gets back on track.

 

Stewie wrestles the jeep down the slope. He avoids the precarious ledge. More overturned vehicles litter the woods below. Tanks, tank destroyers, trucks, not all of them slipped off the road. Some have gaping holes in their sides, some have charred battle scars. Near the bottom of the canyon, many of the conifers have been snapped in half, as though lightning struck. Many more trees have their tops missing. Artillery blasts in these woods would have turned standing timber into a zipping hail of razor blades. A man could get cut to ribbons by flying wood.

 

How do you fight in there? No visibility through the crowds of firs. Tangled dark terrain. You’re facing an enemy on his own turf, who’s had ten years to dig in.

 

Stewie guides the jeep around the foot of the hill. In a glen ahead, Bandy gets his first look at the Siegfried Line. He tells Stewie to pull over. He scrambles in his pack for his 35mm Leica to take some shots of the dragon’s teeth.

 

The Germans have withdrawn from this section of the Line. Even empty, it’s forbidding. The dragon’s teeth protrude from a concrete mat thirty yards wide. The teeth are pyramids of reinforced concrete three feet high in the front, rising to twice that height toward the rear. They’re staggered in such a way that a tank couldn’t drive through them without getting stuck or tipping. Bandy can tell from busted spots that the mat itself is up to six feet thick. Concertina wire runs across all the gaps. An American sign has been posted in front of the barriers warning of trip wires and antitank mines. Placed as bookends are two massive concrete pillboxes, located to give the Germans interlocking fields of fire. Both are darkened to blend with the forest. Spread everywhere are gun pits, foxholes, bunkers, redoubts for artillery pieces. Seventy-five meters back through the trees, Bandy views another line of teeth, pillboxes, and fortifications just as forbidding.

 

He raises his Leica, meters the light, and squeezes off several shots. He hears the quiet clack of his shutter and thinks how tinny and puny a sound it is next to the missing cacophony of this place. Again, unbidden, he hears and sees the phantom roar of artillery, smashing trees, galloping desperate men. War. The Hürtgen is soaked with war.

 

Bandy marvels at the labor that must have gone into creating this complex of strongholds. The Siegfried Line runs for hundreds of miles, the length of the German border with Belgium and France. Bandy considers the Egyptian pyramids and the incredible toil that went into building them. He will send a caption with these photos mentioning Egypt. He wonders how many died just building the damned things there, and here in Germany.

 

Stewie leaves the jeep to walk up beside Bandy. The boy whistles.

 

“Big.”

 

Bandy nods behind his camera. He doesn’t want to talk. Stewie’s whistle was out of place. This isn’t a foldout in a girlie mag. It’s a battlefield, a reverent spot. Bandy knows what happens to soldiers in these places, has recorded it, shared it.

 

“Where’d they all get to?”

 

Bandy shoots his last two frames. He lets the Leica hang by its strap.

 

He points into the Hürtgen. “Backing up.”

 

Stewie puts his hands in his pockets. “Well, I reckon they’re gonna keep backin’ up all the way to Berlin.”

 

No, Bandy thinks. Not true. The Germans are going to turn and fight. We’re in their homeland now. They’re going to put the Rhine to their backs and bare their teeth. The Nazis, the German soldiers, even the people know full well what they’ve done in this war. They know about the Jews, the treatment of prisoners, the wretchedness they’ve spread over Europe and Russia. They’ll fight back because it’s their only hope to escape their guilt. There are more battlefields in the making, more undug graves and shrines unnamed. But Bandy doesn’t bother to answer the boy’s bravado this way. Stewie will not be among the ones facing the Germans when they make their stand here and in the east against the Reds. He’s a nice kid. A good driver. Probably a decent ballplayer. Bandy and his camera will press forward, will be there.

 

“Let’s go.”

 

After another half hour slogging in the jeep without chat, they’re stopped by a guard posted on the road.

 

“Got to leave the vehicle here, sir,” the soldier says. Bandy notes he’s a paratrooper with the Eighty-second Airborne.

 

Bandy smiles. Where the Eighty-second is, there’s action. Italy. Normandy. Holland. The Bulge.

 

The soldier adds, “The road stops here, sir. We haven’t cleared the rest of the mines yet.”

 

Bandy hands the guard his press credentials. The soldier looks the plastic card over and returns it. “We’re bivouacked about a mile ahead, in Vossenach. Just stay off the road, keep to the left. That’s cleared.”

 

“All right. Thanks.”

 

To the right, behind the soldier, a well-trod path heads into the trees.

 

Bandy asks, “What’s down there?”

 

The paratrooper shakes his head. “The Kali River, sir. But the trail is off-limits.”

 

Bandy’s instincts tingle. The Leica around his neck tugs like a divining rod in the direction of the path.

 

“Why’s it off-limits?”

 

“Orders from my lieutenant.”

 

“And where did he get his orders?”

 

“I don’t know, sir.”

 

“Sergeant. You know who I am.”

 

“Yes, sir, Mr. Bandy. You’re the Life photographer.”

 

“You saw my press credentials. I’m cleared for classified areas.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“You understand I’m a captain.”

 

The trooper wags his head and starts to speak but stops himself. This is bull and he knows it but can’t prevent it.

 

“So I understand, sir.”

 

Bandy climbs out of the jeep and shoulders his packs. He raps Stewie on the shoulder.

 

“Thanks, pal,” he says to the driver. “I’ll take it from here.”

 

Before Bandy can step away from the jeep, the paratrooper intercepts him.

 

“Sir.”

 

Bandy softens. “Son, look. I’m not gonna get you into any trouble. I’ll make sure if anyone asks they know I pulled a rotten trick on you.”

 

“It’s not that, sir. I just gotta ask you something.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“I gotta ask you to be respectful. Down there.”

 

The soldier’s face, young and strong, has gone solemn, an ancient plea in his eyes. Bandy’s gut quivers. Something bad, ancient as death, has happened in the valley below.

 

“Always, sergeant.”

 

The paratrooper nods, believing. Bandy walks away.

 

Stewie throws the jeep into gear and does a quick half circle. He cuts the engine and uncoils from the seat. He jogs ungainly to Bandy.

 

“Mind if I tag along?”

 

“Yes, Stewie.”

 

The boy considers this for a moment. His voice is polite.

 

“Mr. Bandy. You said you really wasn’t an officer or nothing. You can’t order me not to come.”

 

“But I can have that fella back there stop you. Sounds to me like he’d do it.”

 

“But he’ll let me if I’m with you. I’d like to come, Mr. Bandy. Just partway.”

 

Bandy cocks his head.

 

“Like you said. I’m no officer.”

 

The trail winds through the trees, down into another canyon. Receding patches of snow on the branches and earth cling in the dark forest like vanishing innocence. Bandy strides ahead of the young driver. He does not turn to look back but figures the boy is walking bent double to get under the limbs. Bandy imagines having to fight like that. On all sides of the path is strewn jetsam of battle: brass bullet casings, trash from med kits, tree trunks scalded bare by glancing rounds. Stewie walks without noise. He falls behind. Stewie is stopping to look. Maybe, Bandy thinks, now he sees the ghosts.

 

But in another minute there are not ghosts but bodies. On all sides of the trail corpses, dozens of dead men, lie in the freeze frame of death, where they fell and how they fell. They’ve been refrigerated by winter, not touched by the living in months. The men look freshly killed, the chill has kept them from bloating and rotting. Their skin looks almost supple. Snow melt has washed the blood from the ground, but darkness stains the soldiers’ uniforms and clings in the crevices of hands and wounds.

 

In shock, Bandy stops walking.

 

How can this be? The dead left on the ground like this, uncollected in such numbers? He scrambles in his head for an answer.

 

There is no smell, the sap in the pines is thick with the cold. The valley is silent, no birds, no wind, not a voice. But there are hands and feet and eyes and guns everywhere. Three months ago there was too much noise and smell, hand-to-hand fighting, hot horror. Now it’s frozen, as though Nature took her own photograph of the war this way.

 

Stewie comes behind him. The boy’s face, a full head above Bandy’s eyes, is stamped in terror. This is the great dread for a soldier, for every man in uniform in every capacity of arms, that he will die and be abandoned on the ground. His sacrifice unknown, eaten into the earth. To give your life and in return be forgotten.

 

Stewie doubles over and tries to retch. Bandy walks on.

 

He could say something to the boy but chooses not to. He’s not responsible for Stewie, who pivots on the trail and flees. Bandy answers to America; his camera answers to history. And here both he.

 

Bandy is alone now with the bodies. Americans and Germans rest side by side. Bandy sees ultimate stories in their positions and final gestures, hieroglyphs of how grisly the fighting must have been here in the Hürtgen. Men have their hands on rifle stocks ramming bayonets into the enemy, to be killed from behind by another man who himself was felled somehow by one of the attackers or defenders. Kindled tanks and trucks rest farther off the trail where they were destroyed, some have charred men hanging from them, their attempts to escape their blasted vehicles thwarted. Strange, Bandy thinks, when there’s only a fortress or a field of quiet weapons before him, the air bristles full in his mind with battle sounds. But here, with the dead flung on the ground, his brain stays mum.

 

Bandy kneels on the trail. He takes from the pack his Speed Graphic and stows the Leica. The Speed Graphic is a big camera, bulky once it’s folded out of its case. It is the more difficult camera to use but it produces a four-by-five-inch negative, providing unchallenged clarity. Bandy has entered the valley of death, it is an honor to be here. He’ll be respectful, as requested. He slides the expanding leather bellows into place with a snap. The metal click flits off among the corpses, a petty and alive sound. Bandy shoulders his pack and walks farther down into the canyon almost on tiptoe.

 

Between every photo, Bandy has to slide out from the camera’s rear a thin, two-shot film pack, reverse it or get out a new pack and slip it in. His hands and eyes are absorbed. His heart stays nimble, dodging out of the way, negotiating the scene as carefully as do his feet. He does not feel ghoulish or inappropriate busy among the dead. He’s exhilarated. The job, the opportunity, courses through his veins. The clink of the shutter is the armor around his life, the flipping mirror is his shield; the camera’s quiet clatter keeps emotion at bay. So long as he looks through the camera lens, he sees this scene the way a reader of Life will later see the images on the page, from a distance. Bandy is moved, yes, but also removed. There’s no other way, if he or any war photographer is to do this work.

 

And it is vital work. Images of war must be on coffee tables and in breakfast nooks back home. Mom and Pop and Sissy must behold war. Bandy can’t make them smell it or hear or touch it from their sofas and church pews but he can help them see it. The costs must be made true, real and horrible for everyone, so nations will be cautious before choosing conflict. History repeats when the lessons go unchronicled.

 

Bandy is careful not to take pictures showing the faces of American dead. He frames them to avoid name patches or divisional insignia. No mother at home will see a Charles Bandy photo and recognize her fallen son. With German bodies, he is not so cautious.

 

The men wear the “Bloody Bucket,” the red keystone emblem of the Twenty-eighth Infantry Division. They must have fought through this canyon towards the Kali River valley in the late fall before the first snow. The combat was savage. But afterward, how could these bodies not have been retrieved and buried? How could Army Headquarters not have been aware of the disaster down here?

 

Bandy imagines the canyon filled with snow soon after the battle. The steep trail from the west would have become impassable with the first storm. The Germans withdrew east from this part of the Hürtgen, perhaps planning on coming back but never making it. So the dead, hundreds of comrades from both armies, were left winterbound and neglected. In the thaw of the past week the bodies resurfaced. The Americans have only now returned to the Hürtgen and found them.

 

Bandy tucks in his lips, boggled. How to explain this? War, he thinks. It’s just war, the catastrophic made commonplace. No one will take responsibility for this. The Kali River canyon, so hideous right now, will be tidied up by administrators, washed white not with snow, but more permanently, with paper and some lies.

 

The trail leads a half mile to the bottom of the canyon. There, Bandy finds a mountain stream swollen with run-off. The water makes a peaceful riffle. He follows the stream around a wooded bend. Emerging into a clearing Bandy sees an abandoned American aid station. The pretty water surges past two large canvas tents. There is a jeep marked with a red cross. Litter cases, more than two dozen of them, are arranged in a neat line beside the stream, like railroad ties. The eerie silence of the Hürtgen is not chased by the moving water, the almost antiseptic air hovers sharp and empty. The forest seems asleep.

 

Bandy steps towards the tents. A cold suspicion rises in him that the bundles on the stretchers are not empty blankets. His approach soon reveals they are dead U.S. soldiers.

 

On reflex he halts far enough away to encompass the whole scene through the viewfinder of his Speed Graphic. Once the aid station is inside the metal square, he prepares to release the shutter.

 

These men too have been preserved by the cold. But unlike their fellows felled in the calamity among the trees, nothing comes through Bandy’s lens to suggest that these soldiers are dead. They made it this far, they had a chance. The corpses are in repose, hands crossed over their pulled-up blankets, chests and heads still wrapped in bloody gauze gone black. The fighting must have overtaken them here, in what should have been sanctuary. In the melee the aid station was abandoned. The men could not be moved. They died on their stretchers, alone with each other and the anointing specter.

 

The canyon rises around him in shambled trees, cluttered with cadavers. The stream burbles poisonously. He feels like he’s in the cupped palms of Death itself. The camera wavers in his own hands. Does history need to see this?

 

On the stretchers mouths are open. What would they say?

 

Bandy promised. He is respectful. Always.

 

He drops to a knee. He opens his camera bag and fills his pockets with film.

 

~ * ~

 

 

 

February 6, 1945, 11:35 A.M.

Livadia Palace

Yalta, Soviet Union

 

 

STALIN NEVER TIRES OF HAVING MEN SALUTE HIM. HE WALKS THROUGH the preposterous foyer of the palace with strides as broad as his short legs will allow. He swings his arms, too long for his torso. He carries no folders or papers to his meeting. He remembers everything; why carry papers? When he passes, Americans snap straight as though electric currents have run up their legs.

 

Stalin walks alone. His heels click on the marble floor, little socialist hammer shots against the walls and statuary of Czar Nicholas II. Every echoed step expands to fill the vast cavity of the dead czar’s entrance hall above the Black Sea. Every footfall makes these foreigners watching him rigid. Stalin does not acknowledge the attention he generates. This is as it should be.

 

They have come to me, he thinks. The two most powerful figures in world politics have done Stalin’s bidding. The President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain have made highly inconvenient journeys, both of them ailing, bringing caravans of three hundred and fifty aides apiece. They traveled to Yalta for no reason other than that is how Stalin wanted it.

 

The Red Army under Stalin is about to secure the greatest victory in Russian history, grander than the one over Napoleon. Those old Bolsheviks, the few left alive, they remember Lenin. They have never accepted Stalin as Lenin’s equal, regardless of their varnished praise. But now. Roosevelt and Churchill! America and the British Empire! Both come to the Crimea. To curry favor with Stalin. To accept Stalin and the Soviet Union as equals. Lenin never had that.

 

Stalin rounds a corner, headed for the left wing of the palace, the czar’s former bedroom, where Roosevelt is installed. More Americans whizzing about the halls freeze in their tracks. The President’s pretty daughter, Anna, even bows. That is something.

 

Smiling, the Marshal raps on the ornate door to Roosevelt’s room. And why should Stalin not smile? So far he’s gotten almost everything he wants at Yalta. No direct interference from the West in Poland. Territory in the Far East in exchange for a mere promise that Russia will enter the Pacific war. Extra seats allotted at Roosevelt’s pet project, the United Nations. The lowly French want an occupation zone; Stalin is opposed, Churchill is in favor, Roosevelt waffles. All typical. War reparations, the dismemberment of German industry, these need more talks. But they’re topics that will be handled later.

 

Best of all, in the past three weeks two million Soviet soldiers have swamped Poland. They’re massing right now on the Oder River, fifty miles from Berlin. Finally, the Red Army is anchored across all of eastern Europe.

 

Whoever occupies a territory imposes on it his own social system. That is the political reality of tomorrow, no matter what is decided here at Yalta. Stalin may sit beside Churchill and Roosevelt at the conference table. But today, on the battlefield, in the liberated territories, Stalin towers over them.

 

The President’s door opens. Chip Bohlen, Roosevelt’s interpreter, greets Stalin in fluent Russian and steps aside. Entering the lavish room, Stalin swells in his approach to the seated President. He prefers these private meetings with Roosevelt, away from the fiery mouth of Churchill. Roosevelt said in advance he wants to discuss France. Fine, Stalin thinks, we’ll settle the French. Privately, he wants also to divine what Roosevelt and his generals intend for Berlin.

 

Stalin says, “Mr. President. You are looking well.”

 

Bohlen the interpreter speaks. He follows Stalin to the President. The two leaders shake hands with much muscle, using all four hands in their clasp. Stalin eases into a chair placed across from Roosevelt’s sofa, continuing his morning pleasantries. Bohlen sits in a chair between them, muttering in alternating English and Russian. One of Roosevelt’s women secretaries stands far to the side, she will scribble notes after the real talk begins. When they are all seated, Stalin goes quiet. He glances first to Bohlen’s face, then down at the feet of the man’s chair and the carpet. The interpreter sits as close to Stalin as does the President. Stalin cocks his head. Bohlen slides his seat one pace back. This is proper. Roosevelt should have taken care of it. Logs crackle in the fireplace. There are brandy and treats on a silver server between them.

 

Roosevelt preens. He enjoys Stalin’s flexing. He envies Stalin’s power. Little wonder. Though his nation is the most powerful on earth, the man himself is an invalid, he cannot even stand when Stalin, enters the room.

 

Roosevelt natters about his accommodations, marvelous, magnificent. The view of the Black Sea from his porch is spectacular. On and on. Those czars really knew how to live it up. Yes, Stalin thinks, they did, and that is why the last of them was shot in the back of the head along with his family. Stalin makes agreeable noises, mentions that someday he would like to see the White House in Washington, D.C., he is certain that their poor Russian palaces pale by comparison. Roosevelt guffaws at this, waves his cigarette holder about like an ingenue.

 

Unlike Roosevelt, Stalin is ill at ease in the Livadia. He is equally uncomfortable in the splendor of Churchill’s mock Scottish castle at the Vorontzov villa and in his own accommodations at the Koreiz Palace, former home of Prince Yusupov, supposedly the assassin of Rasputin. Stalin listens to Roosevelt extol the virtues of a comfortable bed, the President believing that by doing so he is playing the grateful guest. Roosevelt does not know that this is the crux of why their two nations can never be friends. The Soviet Union is pledged by Marxism and Leninism to destroy capitalism. To burn the West’s plush beds so long as Soviet peoples sleep on straw. Roosevelt speaks always of peace. Doesn’t he know that the Communists are committed to war, either of men or ideology, against the West? Too much of the world’s power has been held in their sway for too long. Too much of the world’s wealth stuffs their mattresses to make them cozy. But those unfortunate arrangements have already begun to change.

 

Stalin is the one who is grateful to Roosevelt, for this dying man’s generosity. After the President is gone, and from the looks of him it will be soon, his successor will surely be of a different mold. Stalin takes what he can, while he can. This is plunder.

 

He laughs in the middle of one of Roosevelt’s sentences, before the translation. Stalin can’t help himself, he is in a grand mood.

 

This is politics.

 

Bohlen tells him the President has said, “I’m glad I could give you a good laugh, Joe.”

 

Stalin inclines his head. This nonsense again with his name. But he is too merry to grimace at this vulgarity. No one dares call him “Joe” or “Iosif.” He goes years without hearing any address but “Comrade” and “Marshal.” Stalin, man of steel, is not “Joe.” Now twice the President of the United States has done it. But Roosevelt is tickled that this informality is finally allowed. A small thing for what Stalin receives in return. He leaves it alone.

 

Stalin’s chuckle goes on while Roosevelt waits. Stalin recalls his quick meeting that morning with Churchill in the Prime Minister’s mobile map room, where he invited Churchill to transfer a portion of his British troops now stationed in Italy up to Yugoslavia and Hungary, to link with Soviet forces already there and go after the Germans in Austria. This was a subtle slap in Churchill’s face and, clever fellow, he caught it. The Red Army has advanced so far that those nations will be under Soviet dominion in a few more days. There is no time for the English to get involved! Insulted, red-faced, all Churchill could say was, “The Red Army may not give us time to complete this operation.” Stalin enjoyed that immensely. Ah, even Churchill is good for a laugh on occasion.

 

The jocularity settles inside him. Stalin knits his fingers. Enough.

 

“Tell me what you are thinking about France, Mr. President.”

 

“Well.” Roosevelt shifts on the sofa cushions as best he can. Stalin sees how stranded the man is atop his legs. He guesses that Roosevelt has changed his mind on the French. Churchill has gotten to him. The President hesitates always before telling Stalin he disagrees with anything Stalin wants.

 

“Winston has made some good points to me lately about France.”

 

Stalin waits. He twiddles his thumbs to express displeasure.

 

Roosevelt explains that he still agrees with Stalin that the French do not deserve much in the way of generosity after the war. After all, they did collaborate with the Germans. But France is Germany’s largest neighbor. And Churchill makes a good case that a weakened France will be less of a deterrent to future German aggression than a strong France.

 

Stalin shakes his head. “It is not postwar Germany which Mr. Churchill worries about. It is me.”

 

“Joe, no.” Roosevelt swats this assertion aside. “Winston, you, and me, we’re all on the same team. England knows what a strong ally they have in the Soviet Union. Sure there are differences. But none so strong that our joint commitment to world peace isn’t stronger. Am I right?”

 

Stalin cannot always believe that the President speaks candidly when he says these things. You do not go from a world of international rivalries suddenly to a world of international cooperation.

 

“Yes, Mr. President. Of course.”

 

Roosevelt turns to Bohlen and says something that goes untranslated. The secretary does not record it. Stalin suspects it was nothing more than a “There, see?”

 

Stalin holds out a palm. “So you are saying that you wish for the French to be allowed an occupation zone.”

 

“Yes. Winston and I both feel it’s important for French prestige.”

 

That is an odd phrase, Stalin thinks, to ascribe prestige to a people who threw up their hands rather than see their Eiffel Tower in ruins. Russia could build an Eiffel Tower from the bones of Stalingrad alone.

 

“Then I must agree. But the French zone has to come from the American and British zones. We will cede no territory.”

 

Roosevelt anticipated this and says it poses no problem.

 

“This is to include a zone in Berlin?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Stalin has set the city’s name out for discussion like a new piece at an auction. Roosevelt speeds past it to another topic, how much money Germany should have to pay in reparations after the war.

 

Stalin waits for Berlin to come around again. He addresses Roosevelt’s choice of topic; he wants to set a reparations figure now, of twenty billion dollars. Roosevelt agrees that this sum can be the basis for future discussions. This means the President is not ready to take a position.

 

After another half hour, Roosevelt appears finished. The French question is the only one put to rest. Let Churchill win that one, thinks Stalin. No matter. The Western Allies will withdraw from their zones in a few years. The Soviet Union has no intention of doing so.

 

Roosevelt claps his hands. They make a large sound, they are big mitts. Stalin considers, he must have been a beautiful man before his illness, graceful and patrician. The President leans forward, extending a hand to Stalin. The Marshal stands to shake it, signaling that he will go.

 

“Thank you, Joe, thank you. I’m sure these little sessions of ours do a great deal to keep the big meetings on track. I’ll let Winston know what we’ve discussed. He’ll be pleased. And again, I just want to tell you how much I and my staff are enjoying your hospitality.”

 

“It is our pleasure and duty, Mr. President.”

 

“You know,” says Roosevelt. The President seems not to want the conversation to conclude. This is a ritual habit that Stalin has noticed. After proper discussions, Roosevelt enjoys a drink and some chat, almost as a reward for work. He likes a joke or a story, he relaxes as though under a sun when there is idle banter. Stalin pauses while Roosevelt tips the brandy decanter for himself and Bohlen. He lifts his eyebrows at Stalin. Stalin waves the suggestion off.

 

“You know,” Roosevelt says after his first sip, “on the way over here on the Quincy, I made a bet with some of the sailors.”

 

“Yes?”

 

“I bet them that your troops would be in Berlin before ours get into Manila.”

 

This is an incredible thing to say. Stalin cannot believe what he hears. Is the President of the United States handing him Berlin?

 

What of the American and British armies assembling north of the Ruhr? The million soldiers preparing to breach the Rhine? Are they going to stop shy of the Reich’s capital? No, inconceivable! Berlin is the prize!

 

Danger signals nick in Stalin’s stomach. This must be a trick. Has smiling Roosevelt turned cunning?

 

“You believe this, Mr. President? There is very hard fighting going on right now on the Oder line. The Germans are very determined to keep us out.

 

Roosevelt nods. “The Japanese are pretty determined to hang on to Manila as well.”

 

“No.” Stalin smooths down his moustache, trying to mask his surprise, his glee at the prospect that this is really happening. His patience has been rewarded. “No, I am certain you will be in Manila first. Berlin will be very tough.”

 

“Well, we’ll see, Joe. I know your army is tough too. I’ve got faith in my bet.”

 

Stalin decides to sit and accept an offering of brandy. The President pours. Why would Stalin consider leaving the room when Roosevelt wants to talk like this? This is no time to be a teetotaler.

 

To be the first to reach Hitler’s bunker? To haul him and his whore out in the street, to try them and their Nazi cohorts in a Soviet court before the world? This would be the crowning and most historic victory in Europe.

 

Stalin sips an unspoken toast. To Berlin.

 

Roosevelt eases one arm across the back of the sofa. “Another thing I wanted to ask you about.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Our armies are getting pretty close to each other. I think it’s time you and I authorize them to have direct contact. It’ll help prevent any mistakes or unfortunate incidents. Those things can happen in the absence of clear lines of communication.”

 

Stalin cannot think of any reason to resist. It would be very bad if an altercation erupted, even accidentally, between U.S. and Red forces. At least not now, before the Soviet Union is ready.

 

“Mistakes must be minimized, yes. I agree.”

 

“Fine, fine. Also, I’d like your permission for General Eisenhower to speak directly with your Soviet staff instead of having to go through the Chiefs of Staff in London and Washington, like he’s been doing.”

 

“I think that is very important. It is an excellent suggestion, Mr. President.”

 

“Good, good.”

 

“I will have our two staffs work out the details.”

 

Stalin lifts his brandy in tribute.

 

“Na zdrovya.” In the Russian manner, he drains the glass. He is not a drinker of the quality of Churchill and Roosevelt. But he can perform as well as them when needed, in anything.

 

“Mr. President, I will take my leave. Thank you for a very fruitful session. I will see you at the plenary meeting this afternoon.”

 

Stalin lets himself out. Perhaps he has left too precipitously but he had to be alone. In the hall, where other Americans can still see him, he cannot contain it. Walking fast, he balls his fists and holds them before his face as though he has grabbed someone by the lapels and pulled him close. Marshal Stalin mutters, triumphant, “Da. Da!”

 

He hurries to his waiting car outside the Livadia Palace. The drive to the Koreiz takes ten minutes. In the rear seat, he beats a soft rhythm on his lap with open hands to bleed off some of his excitement.

 

If Roosevelt is telling the truth, then the race for Berlin is off. This is a marvel, a blessing of timing. Even though Stalin’s leading forces are only fifty miles from Berlin, they’re in disarray. Koniev and Zhukov have outpaced their supply fines. Determined German bastions remain in their rear, sapping the steam from the advance and blocking supply routes. The Red flanks are too exposed in the north, the front there has lagged almost a hundred miles behind. Some divisions have been ravaged down to four thousand men, less than a quarter their normal size. The weather is atrocious.

 

Even with all these factors at hand, the current plan is to keep pushing, to follow momentum all the way through Poland, across the Oder, and ram into the German capital. Stalin’s generals are plotting the final dash to Hitler’s doorstep, set to jump off next week. Zhukov in particular insists on pressing the reeling German forces, he believes it is the only way to beat the Western Allies to Berlin. The strategy is known to be premature, costly, even risky. Now it is obsolete. Stalin can wait until he assembles an armed strength that will be unstoppable.

 

Stalin will not only win Berlin. Roosevelt has granted him the time— which equates to permission—to gather enough force to take and hold Central Europe.

 

What if Roosevelt’s jest turns out to be a feint? What if, instead of speaking behind Churchill’s back, the President spoke at the Prime Minister’s behest, to lull the Red forces into a lapse so they can make their own move? If Montgomery gets across the Roer River in the next week, what’s to stop him from charging the Rhine and then on to Berlin? Nothing.

 

Soviet forces can still be mustered quickly enough to outstrip any move Montgomery or Eisenhower makes on Berlin. It would be a bloodbath for the Soviet army. But not the first.

 

Arriving at the Koreiz villa, Stalin hurries to his office. He tells his secretary to find Zhukov and get him on the line.

 

Stalin paces the minutes away until his line rings.

 

“Where are you?” he demands of his top general.

 

“I’m at Kolpakchi’s headquarters, and all the army commanders of the front are here too.”

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“We’re planning the Berlin operation.”

 

“No, no, you’re wasting your time. We must consolidate on the Oder, then send all the forces you can to Rokossovsky to bring him up on your northern flank.”

 

Zhukov hesitates.

 

“What about Berlin?”

 

“It is postponed.”

 

“Comrade?”

 

Stalin puts down the phone.

 

He looks up over the mantel, to the portrait of Lenin that travels with him. Lenin is depicted in three-quarters profile, gazing ahead like a captain on the prow of a ship in turbulent waters.

 

“Vladimir Ilyich,” he says to the stern painted face. “They came to see me.”

 

~ * ~

 

 

 

February 17, 1945, 2120 hours

Posen, Poland

 

 

SOMEONE TOSSES ANOTHER LOG ON THE BONFIRE. SPARKS FLEE. THERE’S enough firelight to see. Ilya casts his eyes over the circle of seventy gathered faces. He recognizes only a dozen, and Misha beside him. These familiar men maintain numb visages; they’ve learned to save their fury for battle. The rest fidget. They look scared or angry.

 

The political commissar Pushkov stands at the center. Flames crackle around his voice. He welcomes the new men into the penal company. They are replacements; over eighty percent of the company has been cut away since Ilya arrived four weeks ago. The Germans have fought with desperation while backing out of Poland, battling to keep the Russians out of their homeland.

 

While the commissar speaks, Ilya whispers to Misha.

 

“Would you look at what they’re giving us to fight with.”

 

Misha nods. “Peasants.”

 

“Idiots.”

 

“Mostly liberated prisoners.”

 

“Crazy men.”

 

Misha elbows Ilya. “No crazier than you.”

 

Ilya digs his own elbow at Misha in playful retaliation, too hard. The little soldier staggers forward into the circle.

 

The commissar turns.

 

The politico is tall and hollow cheeked, missing a front tooth. Approaching Misha, who stands caught in the firelight, the commissar directs an open hand at him, as though indicating a curiosity. Ilya swears under his breath at Misha for attracting the commissar’s attention.

 

“Comrade Misha Bakov,” the commissar announces. The gap in the man’s teeth hisses. He shifts the hand over to Ilya. “Ah, and of course, right behind you, Comrade Ilya Shokhin.”

 

Pushkov feigns puzzlement. “Isn’t Shokhin normally in front?”

 

Misha shows no sign of the insult. He snaps to attention and declares, “Yes, Comrade Commissar!”

 

Pushkov glances to Ilya. Ilya smiles, showing his teeth. I have all of mine, he thinks, you shit.

 

The commissar walks to within three feet of Misha. Ilya could toss him onto the fire.

 

Pushkov makes no secret of his disdain for the two of them. He does not like it that any of the penal men, even men as aggressive as Ilya and clever as Misha, leads during battle. They are not officers any longer and Pushkov has reminded them of that. Ilya doesn’t try to collect others around him when the bullets fly, the men simply appear and follow. And Misha just seems to always know more about the battle and objectives than any commissar or officer present. Pushkov doesn’t mind if the two friends survive, but he doesn’t want them to be a distraction to his authority. For Pushkov, the penal company is not the place to show initiative and intelligence. It is only the venue to kill, die if you must, and atone.

 

Facing the commissar, Misha speaks in a formal tone.

 

“Please allow me to state for our new comrades that under your excellent tutelage, Comrade Commissar, our penal unit has made great socialist strides.”

 

The commissar slats his eyes.

 

“Yes. Thank you, Comrade Bakov.” The commissar says no more. He waits, expecting Misha to retire into the ring of faces. Misha sets one foot behind the other as if to retreat. The commissar walks on, satisfied, putting Ilya and Misha at his back. He strides beside the fire, feet kicking out the hem of his long greatcoat.

 

Ilya despises this sort of language, the slavish mouthings of an automaton. But this is how one must pretend around the Communists. The commissars have such capricious power. They can actually shoot you on the spot if they think you’re shirking, or reluctant to fight. Best to behave like a proper machine. The words sounded funny coming from crafty little Misha, like a shirt that’s too big for him.

 

Ilya suppresses a giggle. If a mongrel dog like Pushkov has noticed him, then others, more important ones, have too. Pushkov is not the last word, far from it. Ilya has survived worse than this skinny apparatchik.

 

Misha does not leave the circle. He stands fast. Ilya growls at him, “Come here. Misha, come here.”

 

“You know,” Misha proclaims to the group with a wave of his arms, “Comrade Shokhin was at Stalingrad.”

 

The crowd murmurs. Ilya’s head sinks.

 

Pushkov halts his stroll. He pivots and glares. He does not invite Misha to continue. The little soldier doesn’t wait.

 

“He’s an expert in house-to-house, close-in fighting. He knows everything about going after the Germans in fortresses. Just like the one here in Posen. You’ll see tomorrow.”

 

Misha grabs Ilya’s coat to pull him into the circle alongside him. He might as well tug on a tree trunk, Ilya doesn’t move.

 

“Anyway, if you have any questions, Ilya is very willing to talk to you. Anyone. Just feel free. Okay. Thank you.”

 

Misha steps back beside Ilya. He looks up into Ilya’s face.

 

“Stop it,” the little man says, grinning, “you’re seething.”

 

On the far side of the bonfire, Pushkov rubs his forehead, then resumes his political screed. Ilya yanks Misha away from the circle so fast, Misha’s legs tangle.

 

He demands, “What was that?”

 

“Calm down, Ilya.” Misha straightens his coat and tunic, all untucked by the force of Ilya’s pull.

 

“Misha.”

 

“I don’t like Pushkov. If I was his officer I’d stick him in the front line armed with a toothpick.”

 

“You’re not his officer. You’re not anyone’s officer.”

 

“No. But you watch. Tomorrow morning, when we take on the citadel, you and I will have our own platoon. Just wait and see.”

 

Misha is right. The only way to get back their positions of command is to lead these men, to constantly demonstrate that their value is far greater than just serving as cannon fodder. They must lead, even without the authority or blessing of their superiors.

 

“From now on, let’s try to do it without tweaking Pushkov.”

 

“Don’t worry about him, Ilyushka. He’ll catch his bullet long before he can do anything to us. You and me, we’re charmed.”

 

Misha smacks his big friend square on the back and steps off into the night. Ilya watches the gait of bluster in the little soldier and wonders what bantam he has set loose.

 

The two men walk from the bonfire to the trench where they’ll wait out the morning offensive. Since January 26, Chuikov’s Eighth Guards have held the city of Posen under siege. The city straddles a critical rail and highway junction in central Poland, including the main avenues from the East to Berlin. Posen cannot just be bypassed, surrounded, and throttled slowly; it has to be taken, the German garrison of over sixty thousand men eliminated, so that the Red troops moving to the east can be adequately supplied. Only half of Chuikov’s forces are here for the fight; four other divisions have pressed ahead to join the armies massing on the Oder. Posen lies a hundred miles in the rear, a dangerous canker, a vital crossroads.

 

The city has been determined by Hitler to be one of his “fortresses.” And a fortress it is. Posen, formerly a city of over a hundred thousand Poles, stippled with high cathedral towers, a college, green squares and parks, museums, fashionable shops, and artists’ alleys, has been girded by the Third Reich into a genuine stronghold. The outskirts of Posen are defended by a ring of eight massive forts, nineteenth-century relics from the days of Prussian occupation. At the center of the rings is the citadel.

 

The huge, pentagonal citadel sits on an elevation crowning the city. Its several forts and ramparts are reinforced by three-meter-thick bulwarks of earth. The approaches to the forts are protected by a deep and wide depression—a brick-lined moat without the water—every part of which can be put under intense fire from embrasures in the walls, dirt ramparts, and machine-gun nests concealed within. The citadel is manned by a corps of twelve thousand Germans who have been ordered by Hitler to delay the Russian advance, to defend their posts to the last man.

 

Over the past two weeks, Posen has been transformed again, this time by the Red Army, into a burning husk. With great effort Chuikov stormed the outer forts and defense rings, razing every obstacle with artillery and street fighting. Rows of public buildings and homes have been blown to the ground by tank fire, blackened by flamethrowers, riddled by sweeping machine guns. Hitler’s fortress Posen is now occupied by Eighth Guards, except for the citadel in the center. Now all weapons are turned towards the soldiers inside.

 

Into the night, huddled in their trench, Ilya and Misha talk. During the combat of February they’ve made each other pupils. Misha teaches Ilya broad strategy, not from the ground level where Ilya is a proven master, but operational tactics, military theory. Until his fall from grace, Misha claims he was being groomed for high command. Ilya, accustomed to killing a single man at a time, with bullet or thrust, listens in admiration. Misha’s expertise is apparent, his knowledge of military history the clear result of years of study and fascination. He visits not only Soviet strategies but classic generals, campaigns, and mistakes, Wellington, Patton, Thermopylae, Little Big Horn. Misha has even developed an acceptable facility with the German language.

 

In return, Ilya spins tales of his own battles. His recollections are vivid, imprinted in his memory by the most indelible inks, black fear and crimson scrawls. The stories are individual scenes and killings. He describes the setting, a basement, a hallway, a field, a street. He tells Misha what weapons he used, or how he did it with his bare hands. What he was feeling, how dry his mouth and skittish his nerves. How he approached, running, creeping, crawling, how he escaped. Misha listens and pulls his knees into an embrace, balling up and sometimes jerking at the crescendos of some of Ilya’s tales. Ilya doesn’t relate lessons. He lets clever Misha glean what he will.

 

During February, Ilya has watched Misha’s courage grow. The little man is no war hero yet, neither is he a coward. Misha is cautious, where Ilya is brazen, wanting to prove and reprove his mettle. Together, their instincts counterbalance. Ilya and Misha stay alive. Together, they refuse to die.

 

In the night around them, preparations are made for the final assault on the citadel. Ammo carts squeak when unloaded. Bundles of sticks— fascines—are tied with string and flung onto gigantic piles. These will be tossed into the moat so that men might run across to the inner ramparts. Assault ladders and walk bridges are lashed together from logs and leather. Flamethrowers are topped off with incendiary oil. Misha says if you took away the modern rifles and big cannons, you’d have an old-fashioned attack on a medieval castle.

 

They sleep against each other for warmth. Misha curls inside Ilya’s frame like a piglet, but neither feels embarrassment, men do what they must in war. There will be time to laugh about it and shrug, years later, if alive.

 

Two hours before dawn their company is assembled and fed. When the first tincture of morning lifts the citadel out of darkness, Ilya and Misha have crawled with their company to within one hundred meters of the edge of the moat. The three other companies of their battalion line up to their right, three hundred men total. The remainder of the infantry division waits in reserve. Behind the four companies inching forward are sapper squads, carrying explosive satchels and assault ladders.

 

Rising ahead is the long southwestern face of the citadel. All five sides of the fortress are besieged every day to keep the German garrison inside split and occupied. Ilya’s battalion is ordered to charge the moat at this spot, enter it, cross and climb the inner rampart on the far side, and establish a foothold on top. When they are secure there, the rest of the division will advance and an attempt will be made to insert the first Red troops inside.

 

Once down in the moat, Ilya’s company will face fire from slits in the moat walls and rampart, bunkered machine guns in the moat, and enfilading fire from both flanks out of redoubts at the corners of the citadel. Ilya does not say it to Misha, but he likens this dawn mission to sprinting into a hailstorm. The bullets will be so thick, you might run on them like stepping stones.

 

The first salvos from the heavy artillery two hundred meters to the rear rocket low over their heads. The men bury their chins in the dirt. The big guns don’t have their turrets elevated; they’re so close, they fire trajectories level with the ground. Ilya recognizes the reports, there’s an array of firepower pouring in:T-34 tanks, captured German 88s, even the big 203mm cannons. A five-minute barrage batters the inner walls of the moat and dirt rampart in a concentrated area. The earth under Ilya’s belly shivers like a cold woman. There’s nothing he can do to comfort her.

 

When the explosions abate, the smoke thins. Ilya’s spirit sinks seeing that the shelling did little but plow up the thick sheath of dirt above the rampart. Chunks have been chewed out of the citadel walls but the bastion stands marred only, not breached. Ilya spits. He wants to curse, but now is not the time to try one’s luck.

 

The battalion lies still. No orders have come forward to charge the moat. Ilya looks up to see it will be a clear day, a rarity in February over Poland.

 

Another roar issues from behind. More artillery screeches past, exploding into the rampart. Again the earth shivers. This time the bursts are even more narrowed against the wall. The big Russian guns hammer at some bull’s-eye on the rampart. The barrage sounds so low-flying, Ilya thinks if he stood he would have his head taken off.

 

For another five minutes, shells whomp into the citadel. The rising sun and the battered building, Misha beside him and the rest of the men, all of the morning, disappear from Ilya’s sight behind a shower of brick chips, vapor, and concussion. He closes his eyes and rests his face in the crook of his elbow.

 

He lifts his head when the bombardment halts. Echoes and smoke hold the morn, then depart.

 

A “hurrah!” issues from up and down the battalion line.

 

Misha points.”There’s a hole! In the rampart!”

 

Ilya sees it. The gap is no wider than two meters, but it is a black wound punched in the side of the citadel. Now there’s a goal to aim for in their dash through the moat.

 

Ilya readies to rise to his feet and charge. At that moment, on the parapet above the rampart in front of the company, a white flag emerges.

 

First, several cautious heads, then chests and arms, appear around the flag. More white flags step forward. At least forty German soldiers shout, “Nicht schiessen!” Don’t shoot.

 

Every man in Ilya’s company lifts his gun but no triggers are pulled. The Germans walk to the edge of the rampart, dropping their weapons as they come. With hands held high, the first soldier slides down its face.

 

He is the only man to reach the moat floor alive.

 

From behind, a machine gun chatters. The men are gunned down. They jerk as if kicked in the back, then roll like lost toys into the moat. The last standing soldiers twist to face the guns, to die with bullets not in the back. In moments, they too have crumpled to the bottom, an avalanche of murder.

 

Ilya is stunned. Some diehard Nazi inside the walls refuses to let these men choose life. When the final soldier is down, the citadel grows quiet. Along the line the fighting has stopped. All have turned their eyes to this terrible spectacle.

 

At the near crest of the moat, a white cloth rears. Even at a hundred meters Ilya sees it is blood-spattered. The surrender flag rises; beneath it is a scared and shaken man, the lone soldier who stood at the bottom of the moat, with the betrayed bodies of his comrades a high tide around his feet. He has no choice but to walk forward to the Russians, all eyes on him. He reaches the lip of the moat wall. He strides towards Ilya’s company. Ilya and the men shout to him, “Come on! Come on!” Behind the soldier a shot barks. The man stops. He turns to face the citadel, pitifully small, appealing his fate. Two more shots finish him and his banner.

 

Ilya growls, he hears it from his tongue before he knows what the sound is. He is the first to his feet.

 

He charges. The growl becomes a bellow. Like a beast the citadel howls its defiance. Taking a running leap forward, Ilya senses bullets thud into flesh behind him. The men who are slow to rise and run with him are the bodies who stay behind forever; once the guns see you they choose the best targets, the hesitant ones. Misha is on his feet too. He is smaller and quicker. He shouts at Ilya’s heels, ”Go, go, go, go!”

 

Ilya lifts his PPSh. He releases a burst at a muzzle flash coming from a narrow slit in the rampart wall. He can’t hit anything running at this distance but the closer he gets he might make them blink. The galloping men on all sides of him fire as well, and from three hundred joggling weapons they emit an effective covering fire.

 

The company hustles to within ten meters of the edge of the moat. A handful in Ilya’s company are wounded in the surge and lie on the short plain the rest have crossed. The dead German soldier lies on his back just steps from where Ilya drops. The company sets up a firing line. Quickly the sappers crawl forward dragging assault ladders. Ilya and the line open up with every rifle to cover the sappers. The ladders are hauled a pace at a time to the edge of the moat. Once they’re in place, the company will stream down them and break across the floor to the opposite bank. Two of the sappers jump up and hurl smoke canisters into the moat, then are shot down to tumble out of sight behind their billowing bombs.

 

Next a pair of men wearing portable flamethrowers hurry forward. Ilya and the rest of the men keep up their firing. The rampart wall grows cottony behind pink puffs of busting brick. The flamethrowers spew streams of fire twenty-five meters across the moat. The flames splash over the embrasures, trying to silence them. Ilya rotates his submachine gun to accompany the flames. Bullets and eruptions strain every muscle, smoke and fire fill every dart of his eyes. Hundreds of weapons are in full voice around him. Men scream when they’re hit, those still firing bray for revenge and fire more, madder. Even in Stalingrad, where Ilya took part in battles this pitched and dangerous, never was a fight so chaotic.

 

The flamethrowers exhaust themselves. The two men pull back. This section of the citadel pauses to collect itself. The company stops firing. Elsewhere down the line, men continue to engage the brick monster.

 

Ilya knows they cannot hold this position. They’ve thrown everything at the walls and can’t approach any closer to the moat. After the blunted charge, eight more men in his company lie dead or wounded. Without concern for who is supposed to give the orders, Ilya readies himself to shout “Fall back.”

 

He glances over his shoulder to see how the men are arranged, how best to retreat. He shifts to sit up higher, to holler and motion the company a hundred meters back.

 

A tug comes at his pants leg. Misha lies beside him.

 

“Maybe you shouldn’t do that, Ilyushka.”

 

Blood stains Misha’s front and collar, trickling down the side of his neck. A gash streaks his cheek. His right earlobe has been shot away.

 

Misha looks to the rear. With his head turned, Ilya sees the little man will bleed for a while but the dribble will stop. He’ll need stitches. He’ll have a battle scar.

 

Ilya tells him, “We’re going to get killed up here.”

 

The little man pinches his shoulders together. “They’ll just send us up again. That hole in the wall is the only way in.”

 

Ilya eases to his elbows to listen. “All right,” he says, “Captain Misha. You have some grand strategy?”

 

Misha points at the battered walls. “I figure it this way. The citadel’s a fortress, right? They’re surrounded. They’ve got no supply lines. All the ammo they have is all they’re going to get. If I was in command in there, you know what I’d do? I’d tell my men to fire only to repulse attacks. Save your rounds, you won’t be getting any more.”

 

“Why not just pick us off right here?”

 

“Because, Ilya, this is a delaying action. They’ve got absolutely no intention of winning, or getting out of there. You saw what happened when those men tried to surrender. Some dyed-in-the-wool Nazi officer dick made an example out of them. No one gets out alive, that’s their order. Just like Hitler told Sixth Army at Stalingrad.”

 

Ilya recalls the starving wraiths that were German and Italian soldiers, left by Hitler to hold “Fortress Stalingrad,” one million men left to rot.

 

Misha continues. “In the last two weeks, Posen has already tied up four of Chuikov’s divisions. That’s seventy thousand men along with tanks and artillery. If the Germans can hold out in the citadel for another two weeks, down to the last man, they’ve won as far as Hitler’s concerned.”

 

Misha draws a tender finger down his cheek. He winces crossing the bullet gash. He examines his blood on the fingertip, then sucks it off with a scrunched face.

 

“Besides, if we retreat it just means we’ll be back attacking again in another hour. We’re pretty dispensable, you know.” Misha takes in the crop of bodies around them. “But running up, running back, running up again, I don’t like it. And I don’t think the officers will either. We’re here now, let’s see what we can do. I think it’s our best chance.”

 

“All right. You have a plan?”

 

“Almost.”

 

Ilya reaches to Misha’s mangled ear. “Does that hurt?”

 

“Fucking yes that hurts! Ow!” Misha slaps the big hand down.

 

“You’re going to look stupid when that heals.”

 

“It’s a worry I want very much to have someday Now let me think.”

 

Misha sticks his tongue behind his lower lip. Ilya taps the dirt with his fingertips. A burst from one of the company is answered by a tower, stitching the ground two meters from Ilya’s boots. He shinnies out of the way. The company answers. The tower shuts up, broods, waits.

 

“Now would be a good time, Misha.”

 

Misha nods.

 

Without a word he crawls away, to the sappers behind. A minute later he returns with two satchel explosives and four sappers hauling a ladder.

 

“Ilya.” He juts his thin chin at the citadel walls. “I’ll bet it’s awful loud in there.”

 

“Probably.”

 

“Brick walls. Low ceilings. Tiny windows.”

 

“Yes, I’m sure it’s less than ideal lodgings. Your point.”

 

“Let’s try something.”

 

Misha hands over one of the satchels. He sets the ten-second timer on his pack and slithers toward the lip of the moat. Shocked at the little man’s eagerness, Ilya hesitates, but recovers and joins him. Five meters from the lip, the citadel opens up on them, answered by the company. Bullets sizzle in both directions.

 

Misha hurls his satchel, landing it directly beneath a firing embrasure in the rampart. Ilya tosses his next to it, a lucky fling, but he doesn’t stop to admire his work. The two scramble away from the moat and bury their noses in the dirt.

 

The twin explosions rock the ground, clods of dirt rattle down on their helmets. Misha rises and fires at the left tower. Ilya sees the plan and joins in. The rest of the company turn their weapons on both towers left and right, keeping them under fire, gnawing at them. The embrasures are obscured behind wasps of bullets at their sills. The sappers hurry forward and lower their ladder over the edge of the moat. They scurry back behind the company. When the shooting stops, the ladder is in place.

 

Ilya is impressed. Misha’s tactic is simple. The Germans have three defense points covering every meter of the moat: from straight ahead, and with flanking fire from the tower redoubts. The company can’t storm the rampart head-on, they’ll be cut to ribbons from front and sides before they even drop the ladders in place, much less get down them. They can’t just sit back and bombard the citadel, it’s too solid; the defenders are barricaded under brick and mounds. And with the infantry this close to the citadel, the artillery can’t operate. But if the gunners inside the walls can’t be eradicated with artillery or reached by bullets, they can be stunned with big enough explosions. If the flanks are kept busy with suppressing fire, the company can surge down the ladders and attack the rampart before they regain their senses.

 

How to make big enough explosions?

 

Misha answers the question before Ilya can ask it.

 

“Oil drums.”

 

Ilya hoists his eyebrows.

 

“Big empty oil drums. We pack them with explosives. Light the fuses and roll them down the slope, right under the firing points. Boom. We stun them cross-eyed. We cover the towers, rush down the ladders, and head for the hole. And we get someone up on top of the rampart to drop satchel charges down the ventilation ducts.”

 

Ilya pokes out his bottom lip and nods. “I haven’t got anything better.”

 

“Let’s go tell Pushkov.”

 

“He’ll be thrilled to see us.”

 

“He’ll have to give us credit, Ilya. It’ll work.”

 

Ilya lowers to his stomach to scrabble back to Pushkov’s position, behind the sappers. Misha is beside him.

 

Before moving, he asks, “And what’s your plan after we’re inside? Pushkov will want to know that too.”

 

“Simple.”

 

Misha sticks a finger in Ilya’s breast, the spot where Ilya used to wear his medals.

 

“You take over.”

 

* * * *