Little Lost Lambs, page 71
Again Renn understood. The captain was making a game of the two Slavs. It occupied his mind and he liked to watch them.
“Russians are courageous,” Renn repeated — it had been taught him — “because they are stupid.”
The captain was nailing up a drawing of a woman taking off her shirt. “No,” he said. “In your factories of Middle Europe, maybe their workers are stupid. But here in the Wald they are intelligent. Yes, they are forest creatures, wiser than we, Sir Photographer!”
Renn thought: he has been here too long, in the winter.
“And how do you know they are Russians?" the captain demanded, scowling. “Because they understand us when we speak Russian? What does that mean? What do we know of their secretive souls? Are they Lithuanian chapel-goers, or stubborn Poles? Are they Chouvash, or Laps from the tundras? Or Buriat animal-keepers from Siberia? The Devil knows!” He waved his arm toward the east. “There are a hundred peoples out there, Slavs and Asiatics, and millions upon millions of kilometers of forest. What do we really know of all that, Photographer Renn? We have been watching the west, and now we march into the east.”
Renn thought: he has gray in his hair; he speaks Russian better than I — perhaps he was here in the last war.
The next day mist hung low over Strong Point Sixty-eight. No planes touched at the field. The light was so bad Renn decided against using his camera. He was fiddling with it when he saw Daryushka at work in a stretch where there were no gun emplacements. She was towing firewood, uphill, on a rude sledge made of two dead branches tied together. When she saw his camera she stopped to look at it.
Behind her the branches had made a regular track in the snow. Renn let her watch while he removed the film magazine and took down the tripod mount of his Contax.
“Would you like to see how the machine works, Daryushka?” he asked.
Really, she seemed interested — so intently she watched while he demonstrated the working of the minicam. It pleased him that the Slavic girl felt the wonder of it.
“You are clever with your fingers,” he said. “You could be employed in making such a German camera as this, at the subject-labor factory we are establishing in Prague. Do you understand?”
Daryushka smiled, pleased. And when she smiled she looked almost pretty, thin as she was. Leaning closer he tried to look full into her gray Slavic eyes. But they evaded him. She was fingering the parts of the camera admiringly, and he had to watch her fingers, in case she should sabotage the camera by stealing a part.
“What a pity,” she said impulsively, “that your German people did not make cameras, instead of guns.”
He remembered then what the captain had said. He thought: she is devilish intelligent for a fisher-girl! Something else odd, he noticed. Hanging from a string, she wore at her throat a silver locket, larger than his thumb. Old work. He took it in his fingers, and saw that it had the head of a bearded man, and a wolf’s head shaped on it. Odd.
“It is Saint Ulass, of the Wolves,” she said quickly.
Finding the catch he opened the big locket. Inside, it was empty. “What good is it?” he asked.
The blood came into her cheeks when he touched her throat. “It protects,” she said. And she went back to her wood load, bending to haul it over the snow. Amused, Renn watched her go off into the mist. She could still believe in a patron saint, and that saint a protector of wolves . . . amused him.
The mist thickened around Strong Point Sixty-eight. Water dripped from the buildings. Unable to use his camera, Renn kept thinking about the Slavic girl. After supper he watched her at the charcoal pit. Going to a range-finder post a hundred paces away, he watched through a bifocal, twelve-power ’scope.
They were eating bread, Alash sharing his chunk with the dog that looked so like a wolf. When all the bread was gone, Alash did a strange thing. He put something bright into the dog’s jaws, and gripped the beast’s head with his hands. He seemed to be talking to the dog, as if to a human being. The girl sat by them.
Then the dog loped away, without looking back. Alash took the girl’s hand and kissed it.
It struck Renn that they were going through some kind of ritual with the dog. It worried him, because he could not make sense out of it. Forest creatures, the captain had said . . . the captain, watching for a message . . . the wolf-dog protected by St. Ulass . . . putting silver into its jaws . . . pagan superstition. He went to sleep thinking about that.
* * *
He heard the shots when the door of his room was flung open by men running out. His watch showed 5:23. Morning, and the faint murk of the snow. He ran stumbling, fighting his drowsiness, out to the observation post of the airfield. A red glow swelled under smoke, over on the river side.
The trestle bridge was in flames.
Fires had been kindled on the ice, under the framework. The blaze climbed up the pine timbers, fanned by a gusty wind. It could not be put out now. A red tinge lighted the faces around Renn. “We have still the ice,” someone said. When he asked how it had been done, he learned the fuel had been laid on the ice by Lithuanians from the far bank. Two of them had been killed by fire from the sentries on the bridge.
It was at 5:42, when the middle of the bridge had fallen in, that firing broke out savagely on the forest side of the fortified area.
Bildberichter Renn recognized the bursts of light machine guns. Three — four. More. Exultantly, he ran for his camera. This would be an attack, at dawn, from the forest. And in spite of mist and murk he meant to get some of the action on his film. He thought: I will write the caption: “Repulse of Bolshevik surprise attack, timed to follow firing of bridge—”
Strapping his battery case on his back, and pocketing a telescopic lens, he caught up the Contax and hurried north, where the crackling of machine guns had increased. He heard a plane roar low overhead and pass by, above the mist curtain. From a platoon of engineers moving north, he learned that the attack was by cavalry which had rushed the mine field and filtered through the advance points under cover of the blowing mist. It had come from the screen of the forest.
Only at times did he see flashes in the mist ahead of him. Visibility was less than fifty yards, except when corridors of clear air opened up. A dark group of riders on small horses crossed ahead of him, thinning out, leaving black blots on the snow. Then the gray mist closed them in.
Avoiding the gun flashes, he crossed a hollow, hoping for a clear sight of something. He found the body of a man, one hand gripping a grenade. The dark face of the rider shone with grease, and leather wrapped his limbs. He lay in a rough track in the snow, and Renn recognized the trail made by the branches Daryushka had been dragging—
“Either they can see through the mist,” said the captain’s voice, “or the devils knew which way to go.” He stepped up and turned the dead rider over with his foot. “Bashkiri” he muttered. “They can see farther than we in this muck.”
The Bashkirs were good horsemen, from the upper Volga region. They drove in as far as they could, mounted, and then assembled in clusters, the captain said, on the higher ground. They seemed to have more grenades and pump guns than lances. In this driving mist it was hard to spot them.
It was spectacular but hopeless, of course — this charge of mounted groups across the perimeter of the German fire-points. Already Renn could hear the panting and rasping of the light tanks and armored cars moving northward to clear out the surviving knots of the Bashkir regiment—
“The Devil himself,” muttered the moody captain, “sent this mist.” He listened, and words exploded. “God in Heaven!”
Renn heard it, too, the sudden ringing crash of high velocity guns. Behind them, on the southern side. But what could be drawing fire from the center of the Strong Point?
He ran, lugging the camera, after the captain to a fire-point.
Shapes almost invisible in the snow and mist were speeding uphill toward the airdrome. Gun turrets swung toward him. Behind the turrets helmeted men clustered.
Soviet armor was pouring into the heart of the fortified zone. It was coming through the gap in the mine field like a river of steel and fire.
It was coming through the inner chain of fire-points, panting behind that devil’s smoke screen of mist. From the direction of the airdrome machine guns and heavy stuff opened with a roar.
Mechanically, BiIdberichter Renn started to screw the telescope lens on his Contax. Surging, immense, and now all around him, there was the action of which he had dreamed. His shaking fingers wore not able to adjust the lens.
Around him, the mortar crew fumbled at their small gun. They were looking for a target and not finding one. Their mouths opened, shouting. But he could not hear them. He tried to think. What was happening? The Bashkir riders had made only a diversion while the medium tanks came through the mine gap with infantry. The tanks went straight to the airdrome as if guided there. But that could not be.
He pulled at the captain’s arm, shouting a question. The captain shook him off, and picked up a grenade from a box unsteadily. He climbed up over the sandbags, and Renn followed.
Breaking through the mist a white monster steamed past, rocking over the mortar emplacement. Air thudded at Renn’s ears, and he fell on his knees. The officer lay in the snow ahead of him, and Renn felt cold inside, and sick.
When men ran past him, he joined them, choking down his sickness. He dropped his camera near the charcoal pit. Beside the firewood there the two Slavs lay. He remembered how Alash had his arm over the girl, as if to push her into the ground.
As he ran past, the door of the radio room stood open. No one was inside. All the landmarks of the Strong Point had become strange in these last minutes. Renn could no longer think clearly because the reverberation of sound beat at his head like hammers.
He found himself sliding after the running men, down a slope. A voice shouted, “This way!” The men pushed and climbed into a truck that churned away from him.
He was down at the river, at the edge of the ice. Soldiers were streaming past him and moving over the ice, near the smoking ribs of the fallen trestle. The truck crawled ahead over the ice.
A shell exploded down-river. The truck disappeared into a dark rush of water. In mid-stream the ice cracked and gave, and the nose of the following truck plunged in. Water swirled over the loosened ice cakes, thrusting them downstream with struggling men falling from them. As far as Renn could see, the ice was breaking up.
* * *
When the firing ceased, and he noticed the quiet, he looked at his watch, which showed 11:05. In spite of his sickness he felt the ache of hunger, sitting with a small group of prisoners near the radio room. He sat looking at his watch, because it was a familiar thing.
Among the Soviet officers examining the radio, Renn recognized Alash. The charcoal burner had washed his face, and he looked younger. He smiled at the others, and said, “Khorosho. Good.”
The mist had thinned away, under the noon sun, and Renn in that light could have taken some perfect views of the Strong Point. But he kept his eyes on the ground.
The only person who spoke to him was Daryushka. She had his minicam and film magazines, and her gray eyes were alight with excitement.
“Picture-reporter Renn,” she said, “we did not lie to you.”
She spoke in good German, a little stilted, like all who learned it, parrot-like in their schools.
“Truly,” said she, “I was born on this river. Only it runs a long way. It runs into Father Dnieper, and he runs past my birth-city of Kiev. It was in Kiev in the siege of 1941 that I learned to plant mines in houses and roads.” She was watching Alash, who spoke as an equal to the Soviet officers. “He was born in the forest, only it was around the city of Warsaw. Yes he was studying architecture, and the drawing of maps there, when the siege came in September of ’39. He was hurt then.”
Renn thought: they have learned what they know in the war itself: that was their schooling.
“Yes, I understand,” he said, and choked on the words. That lame Alash, posing as a charcoal burner, had been able to draw a clear military plan of the Strong Point with its gun emplacements and the gap in the minefield that Daryushka must have located. But how had that map reached the Soviet command?
Then he saw the wolf-dog. It came nosing into their group, and wagged its tail when it scented Daryushka. Immediatelv it went to Alash, who took a silver object from the dog’s jaws and gave the thing to the girl.
Renn started to his feet, then sank back in the snow. He could not go over now, to examine that thing in Daryushka’s hand. He was a prisoner and he could only move at command. Why, he could not eat until someone gave him bread.
Daryushka showed him the bit of silver, the locket of St. Ulass. She also stroked the dog’s head. “He brought it back safe,” she said, “from the charcoal pit in the forest, as Alash trained him beforehand.” She hung the image of St. Ulass again on its string about her throat. “And it did protect us.”
THE last thing you read at night sticks in your mind. Or it might be your subconscious mind. Either way, you keep thinking about it all night, and you never forget it. Somewhere Humphrey Ward had seen that in a book, and it made sense to him.
What he read last on that second night out of Istanbul on the Taurus Express was a small dog-eared volume entitled “Customs of the Medieval Arabs,” and Humphrey Ward had come to a line that said: “A man’s guilt shall be established by the evidence of three independent and trustworthy witnesses.”
“Why three?” he thought. “And only three?”
It didn’t make sense, and when a thing didn’t make sense, Hump chewed at it until he got around to an answer. He liked to do the intelligence quizzes in the magazines. He did them on the quiet, because his average, carefully calculated, was 58.7 which was a little less than good. But the tougher the quizzes were, the better he liked them.
In this case he hit on an answer. Two witnesses to a crime might tell the same lie, or they might imagine they had seen something that never happened—by coincidence! But if three trustworthy gents told the same story, that story would be fact. The odds against three people imagining the same thing were something like one in a thousand. Satisfied that he had the right answer, he put the little volume down on top of one of his bags, and methodically checked the fastenings of his first-class compartment, number seven.
The slide catch was locked on the connecting door; the chain was caught across the corridor door. This wagon-lit car was an ancient number—exactly the type he had known in France in ’18, and just as crowded; although he was now leaving Turkey in the year ’44. The only new thing about the wagon-lit car was a brass sign that said in Turkish: Do not lean out the window because of danger.
Switching off the bright reading-light, he switched on the blue dome sleeping-light. It made him feel at home, like in ’18. Thereupon Hump’s conscious mind switched off the three-witnesses puzzle…
Humphrey Ward was sorry to be leaving Turkey. Overage and overweight for this war, Hump would have liked to get something done in Turkey, where at the urging of his State Department, he had arrived to aid the Turks to test-drill for oil, only to discover that Turkey had no oilfields—or so he had been told. And he would have liked to see a battlefront somewhere, instead of only the fine new American airfields across Africa, where small monkeys skipped around the mechanics, and good canned beer was passed across the PX counters. Even in Turkey, which everyone assured him was a hotbed of espionage, he had spotted not one Axis agent. He had dined at Rejans on pilaf and Turkish coffee without having any Balkan undercover guy breathing down his neck; he had visited all the mosques around the Golden Horn without seeing one Viennese blonde drop a scented handkerchief across his path. He had seen, in short, nothing of this enormous war.
The last war had been much simpler than this. You went forward in one direction, blasting out the jerries… Hump had volunteered to establish contact with a wandering patrol at night in what became notorious later as the Argonne Forest. The patrol he found had been Jerries…
Hump woke up suddenly with the feeling that he had something to do. It was a queer feeling, cold and bewildering, because he didn’t know anything he had to do. Snapping on the reading-light, he glanced at his wrist-watch, and found that it was ten minutes to five.
He felt as if he had to get off that train quick.
“Not me,” he assured himself drowsily. The cold made him cough. Outside, he knew it was still snowing, and probably they were climbing the heights of the Bolkhar Dagh. The jerking of the car had disturbed him. Yet they wouldn’t reach the frontier, the Syrian customs, for an hour or so. And George, the wagon-lit conductor, had his passport and statement of the money on him. Hump called the conductor George because he found the name Haig Kevorkian hard to pronounce.
Hump felt the familiar bulges of his money-belt, checking with his fingers the wad of assorted foreign paper, the square of the express checks, and the fold of his letters of identification. They were all there. No one had been monkeying with his things—no one could have got into that first-class compartment.
Nevertheless Hump felt as if the sergeant had been bawling: “All out, you guys!”
Mechanically, Hump pulled on his shoes and reached for his coat. Then he laughed. What he was doing didn’t make sense. Because this wagon-lit car was so familiar, he had been thinking about France when he went to sleep.
AWAKE now, he remembered who had to get up and leave the train at five o’clock: Tom Hatfield, the other American—the hard-boiled twenty-six-year-old A.T.C. pilot, once a parachute-tester and Panamerican flyer, who hadn’t seen his own country for five years.
Tom had to get off at five, at a place called Adana, to change to a plane that would take him swiftly to Cairo, because Tom, who came from Frankfort, Kentucky, was carrying dispatches from the American embassy at Ankara to the U.S.F.I.M.E. at Cairo; and since Turkey was a neutral country, he had to travel by Taurus Express to the frontier line, where he could board the plane waiting for him. Tom had told Hump that much over the bottles of beer in the wagon-restaurante the evening before—not saying much, except in answer to Hump’s questions, and always keeping that locked briefcase under his arm, or propped up against him, apparently not trusting Hump any more than the others on the train…
