Sanger was not particularly religious, but he felt the dead deserved some respect, some acknowledgment. After he slammed shut the furnace door, he stood at attention and saluted before heading out for the next body.
As he turned around, he saw Rommel standing in front of him. Like Sanger, Rommel was shirtless. His body was a patchwork of scar tissue. Much of it was from the strafing attack that had nearly killed him about seven months ago, but Rommel had experienced numerous wounds in his two wars.
The field marshal paused when he saw Sanger saluting, and after Sanger finished, Rommel began moving his body into position. It had terrible slash wounds and bruises on it; one of the arms was twisted into a completely unnatural position. As a result, it was particularly awkward to handle, and slipped. Sanger caught the body before it fell to the floor, and helped Rommel get it into the furnace. Like Sanger, Rommel then came to attention and saluted.
Afterward, he said, “Thank you, Sanger.”
“You’re welcome, Field Marshal.”
There was an awkward pause; then Rommel said, obviously trying to make conversation, “Those burn scars on your neck and shoulders—how did you get them?”
Sanger reached up to touch his neck. His burn scars went from the middle of his neck down over his left shoulder and onto his back, covering about a square foot of total skin surface. “Aboard Luftschiff Zeppelin 129. The
Hindenberg
.” He remembered the awful pain quite well, but he also liked the feeling of having been a part of such an historic event.
“Really?” Rommel was quite interested. “You were on the final flight?”
“Yes, sir.” Sanger was gratified at the reaction. “I spent my last year of high school in Augsburg, and flew back to the States aboard the
Hindenberg
.” He paused, looked into the furnace flames and remembered the flames that had scarred him, and the young Nazi officer who had saved his life.
“You were in Germany. That must be the source of your language skills. Your family is German, I presume?”
“Yes, my parents are first-generation immigrants, from the Augsburg area, a little town called Haunstetten. I stayed with cousins when I was there. That’s when I worked for you before.”
“You were Hitlerjugend?”
“Yes, sir. You were its military adviser at the time.”
“It was an assignment that didn’t last long. Von Schirach and I had different views of how to build character in young men.” Rommel chuckled ruefully. Baldur von Schirach was the Hitler Youth analogue to Robert Baden-Powell.
“My parents were active in the Bund. We were all big fans of the führer at the beginning. That’s why I went over; I expected to stay and become part of National Socialism and the transformation of Germany.”
“You didn’t stay,” observed Rommel. “Why not?”
Sanger paused for a long time, looking into the flames. “The Nuremberg laws had already been passed. Although Krystallnacht happened later, we often went to the Jewish neighborhoods looking for trouble. At first I went just as a way to fit in, but one night we went too far …”
Sanger could still hear the screams, see the broken glass and the blood trickling from the old man’s skull from the rocks he had thrown. He still didn’t know whether the unconscious man had lived; the blood had pooled quickly. He shook his head to free it from the memories that still gave him nightmares.
“So,” Rommel said, interrupting his reverie. “I think I understand. You personally committed violence against some Jews, blamed the Hitler Youth for leading you on, then returned to the United States and personally declared war on Nazi Germany well in advance of your countrymen. Is that about right?” The field marshal’s voice was harsh, sarcastic.
Sanger looked up, surprised at the Desert Fox’s tone. He thought a minute, then acknowledged the truth. “Well, yes, sir, I suppose that is about right. Except that I know the responsibility was mine, not anybody else’s.”
“It’s good that you remember that. But still, you wage war against your own people to atone for your individual crime. Although, I must add it looks as if your war has gone quite well, Colonel Sanger,” Rommel observed dryly.
The condemnation Sanger heard in Rommel’s voice confused him. Certainly Sanger had condemned himself many times, but when he had shared the story of his actions with others, they had mostly tried to excuse his behavior. “I tried to talk with my cousins about what I had done, what we had done together, but they couldn’t see anything wrong with it. They thought they were acting on behalf of the Party.”
“You don’t agree. You feel your moral judgment in this matter is superior, and you are willing to judge and condemn your elders and even your own people on nothing stronger than your personal ideas of right and wrong.” Rommel’s statements were blunt, almost monotone.
Again, the harshness in Rommel’s tone surprised him. He supposed that this meant that his relationship with the Desert Fox was at an end. It was not the first time he had lost friends over this issue, though the loss saddened him.
He would inform Eisenhower that the time had come to replace him as liaison officer. Nevertheless, he was firm in his principles.
He looked Rommel straight in the eye. “As a matter of fact, sir, I do. That’s exactly right.” Sanger straightened up. He felt stronger, standing once again on firm ground. “I suppose that in this area, I don’t particularly care what anybody else thinks.”
Rommel nodded. “But you still have trouble forgiving yourself for your crime,” the field marshal prompted. His voice was softer now; his one good eye was fixed on Sanger. The fire reflected and glistened in his sweat.
Sanger felt that something important was going on, but he couldn’t tell what it was, as if Rommel was having another conversation at the same time that somehow didn’t include him. “Yes, sir, I do.” That, too, was a fact.
“Good!” The field marshal slapped his hand on the empty cart in triumph. Rommel’s voice was so loud it rode over the roar of the flames, startling Sanger. “You deserve to feel guilt. Such conduct is absolutely unforgivable. Shameful! Disgraceful!”
Sanger was shocked and somewhat hurt at Rommel’s response. He felt embarrassed and small in the field marshal’s eyes. He glanced up. Rommel appeared almost smug, calm, as if he had settled something. He was smiling widely.
“Yes, you were right to declare war, Colonel Sanger. But it will not lift a single gram of your guilt and dishonor. Not today, not in all the remaining days of your life. It excuses nothing. It forgives nothing. If it were otherwise, all the work would only be an exercise in selfishness. Do you understand?” Rommel’s tone had changed, lower, but intense, willing him to understand.
Sanger chewed on Rommel’s words for a moment. Yes, that was right. If his effort were merely a tool to obtain forgiveness, it would be tainted. The work, the atonement needed to be an end in itself, not a means to a selfish end. He nodded, then replied, “I do understand, Herr Generalfeldmarschall. You’re right. Thank you, sir.”
Rommel’s sweat-stained scarred face flickered in the light of the furnaces. “For what?” His voice was friendly, but dismissive. The conversation had obviously become too emotional for Rommel’s tastes. “I did nothing. We should get back to work, not stand around talking.” With that, he began wheeling his cart toward the outer room.
Suddenly, the Desert Fox cried out, clasped his hand to his face, covering his bad eye. “Aaah!” he gasped, the pain overwhelming his normal stoic self-discipline.
“What is it?” asked Sanger, rushing to him.
Rommel looked in Sanger’s direction, his face taut with pain, his body bending over. “My eye,” he said through clenched teeth. A sudden spasm wracked his body, and he dropped to his knees.
Sanger knelt beside him. “Help! Medic!” he shouted. “It’s Field Marshal Rommel! He needs help!”
In the end the Soviet armored spearheads had swept around the fortified city of Poznan and rolled onward, leaving the task of reducing the vast emplacements to the following waves of infantry. The place was inevitably doomed, but to Krigoff it still seemed like the army had wasted a criminal amount of time in the fruitless attack. Even the thunderous artillery barrage, when Petrovsky had at last withdrawn his infantry and ordered the guns to open up, had failed to significantly impact the enemy firepower emanating from the huge concrete fort. The Germans had replied with not just small arms and automatic weapons, but artillery of their own that had somehow been sheltered in the vast emplacements of the redoubt.
This return fire had seemed like an almost personal affront to the colonel of the intelligence section. The guns had been audible for a long time, even within the tin compartment of his trailer, and Krigoff had brooded—not over the insolence of those vicious, but doomed, Nazis, but instead over the stubborn refusal of his army commander to follow the necessary course of action.
To Krigoff, of course, the failure of the bombardment was not proof that the idea of such an artillery attack had been wrong, but that the army general had been too slow to order the guns to open up. Surely if the barrage had commenced in a timely fashion, and the infantry had been pushed to advance under the horrific storm of explosions so that they could have capitalized on the enemy’s disarray, the outcome would have been different.
He had been rebuked by the general, but Krigoff had no regrets about speaking up. If the same situation was to come up again, he resolved that he would not fail to press home the point.
For now, he sat in his lurching trailer, following the vanguard of the tank army as it rolled along the rutted roads of western Poland. He thought of Paulina, riding in a T-34 tank with one of the army’s lead battalions, and hoped that she was safe. He knew that she was fearless, but he had personally spoken with the battalion commander. Without the photographer’s knowledge, he had enjoined the colonel to make sure that she was granted the opportunity to take fine pictures, but at the same time was protected from harm. The CO had promised to do his best, and Krigoff had let it be known that success was the only acceptable option.
With nothing else to do for the moment, he got out the map. Within an hour they would cross over the prewar border between Germany and Poland; the army’s spearheads were already ten kilometers inside the enemy fatherland.
That border was a symbol, but it was only a small relic of the past. Krigoff imagined a future where the arbitrary lines between states were barely acknowledged, as all of Europe—and, eventually, the world—came to accept the doctrines of Lenin and Marx, the theories that had been proven so exceptionally effective in the hands of a true leader like Stalin.
Soon they would reach the Oder River, and Zhukov had already declared his intention to push across that barrier with all possible haste. Krigoff looked forward to that accomplishment, for beyond the river it was only a short distance, eighty kilometers or so, to the heart of Germany itself.
And even then, Berlin would be just the beginning … .