Ordinary Heroes

  "He lies. As always. That is not what he hopes. He would much prefer we die side by side in battle. Tellement romantique."

  Long ago I'd learned not to be the messenger in couples' disagreements, a lesson originally taken from childhood. The more I heard from both Gita and Martin, the less sure I was of the dimensions of their relationship. Nor did it seem that it was very clear to either of them. I was better off with another subject and asked her about Bettjer, the radioman, whose absence I had noticed.

  "Peter? Peter is no good anymore. For some, bravery is like blood. There is only so much in your body. He was very courageous, very bold, but with a month to sit and think about all he has survived, every fear he did not feel before has rolled down on him like a boulder off a mountain. He will drink three bottles of cognac in the day we are gone. Ainsi va la guerre," she added in a tragic tone. So goes war.

  This discussion of Bettjer and his anxieties somehow became a gateway to my own worries. I had felt my nervousness growing as we tromped along. Now, with the description of Bettjer as unmanned by fear, I was attacked full-on by shrieking doubts. Apparently, I did a poor job of concealing them.

  "This is bad talk," said Gita. "I should have told you something else. Martin will watch out for you. He watches for all of us. And there is no need for you to be in the midst of things when the operation starts."

  "If I can be helpful, I would like to take part. I'd feel as if I were a child, merely watching from safety."

  "That is for Martin to say. But if so, you will do well, Dubin. You are a man of principles, no? Principles are the main ingredient of courage. A man with principles can get the better of fear."

  "I thought you doubted the existence of principles."

  "Touche," she answered, and gave me a fleet impish smile. "I do not doubt the power of principles, Dubin. I say only that it is an illusion that they are the first thing in life. It is an illusion we all crave--better principles than the abyss--but an illusion nevertheless. Therefore, one must be careful about what he deems issues of principle. I despise petty principles, obstinate principles that declare right and wrong on matters of little actual consequence. But there are large principles, grand principles most men share, Dubin, and you have them, as well." She showed a tidy smile, and actually patted my hand in reassurance.

  Ahead, Martin had halted at the edge of another open field. He clicked the cricket again as a signal for silence, and Gita dispensed a quick wave before moving toward her assigned place at the head of the line. Antonio fell in behind me. We both watched her dash away, her legs tossed outward with unexpected girlishness, as she drew abreast of Martin. She was extraordinary. No doubt about that.

  "What is she to him?" I asked Antonio suddenly.

  He gave a rattling laugh and shook his long hair, as if I had asked an eternal question.

  "I think she is his glory," he answered. "I think when he looks at her he remembers what he once believed."

  Chapter 10.

  LA SALINE ROYALE

  November 5, 1944

  Dearest Grace--

  Tomorrow I will see my first action. It is too complicated to explain why (and the censors would black it out anyway). But please focus on the word "see." I am going only as an observer, for one day, and by the time you receive this, I will be back and safe and will have written you to say so. I'll mail both letters together, so you never have occasion for concern. I feel as I have always imagined I would in this circumstance, as if my skin might not contain me, and thus I doubt I'll sleep. But for better or worse, I remain eager.

  We start very early in the morning, so I will close now. Just to let you know how much I love you and am always thinking of you.

  David

  November 7, 1944

  Dear Grace--

  Back at HQ and safe. I am much too disappointed in myself to say more. Will write further later in the week.

  David

  La Saline Royale, the royal saltworks, had been opened in 1779 to put an end to fractious competition between bishops and lords for control of what was then a precious commodity. The King declared himself the owner of all the salt in France and auctioned it to European merchants from open-air barns here in Marsal, where the prized granules were mined.

  After invading France, the Nazis had commandeered the saltworks, whose long radiating shafts made it ideal as a munitions dump, eventually becoming the largest in the Lorraine. The works had been built like a fortress, surrounded by both twenty-foot walls of limestone and brick, meant to repel thieves, and the river Seille, which formed a virtual moat at the northern border. With the armaments, mostly large-caliber artillery shells, stored more than six hundred feet under the earth, they were invulnerable to air attack, and a German garrison was stationed in the former mine offices as further protection.

  Martin and his OG had been dispatched to this vicinity in early September to destroy the dump, but the operation had been put on hold when the pace of combat slackened. Now, Martin said, London wanted the mission completed. The Germans had fortified their stores in the interval, making La Saline Royale an even more inviting target.

  We were gathered probably a mile from the salt-works, inside a small shepherd's but in the field of a farmer who was a member of a local resisters' unit, or reseau. Sitting on the dirt floor, the six of us listened as Martin illustrated the operation's plan beside a Coleman lantern. From his field jacket, Martin had removed a pack of playing cards, peeling a backing off of each one and laying them out in rows, until they formed a map of the saltworks and the surrounding area. Biddy and I grinned at each other. The OSS's ingenuity was equal to its legend.

  There were two breaches, Martin said, in the salt-works' fortifications. The only formal approach was from the north to the massive iron front gates, behind which the German troops waited. On the west, the walls parted a few meters where a railroad siding ran down into the mine. Laid for the shipment of salt, the tracks continued to be used to deliver and remove armaments, and emerged on an angled treitle over the Seille, meeting the railhead on the western bank.

  A ground assault against the railroad gate also appeared unpromising. Fording the Seille without bridge work was nigh impossible. `Seille, means `pail,' the name drawn from the depth of the narrow gray river below its steep banks. Even in a season of record floods, the waters remained a good ten feet under the stone retaining walls, which were overgrown with moss and creepers. Worse, where the tracks passed through the mine wall, crews manned two MG42 high-caliber machine guns. Nonetheless, Martin laid his pencil tip there on the map and said this opening would be the point of attack for our party of seven.

  "Merde," said Henri.

  "Tu perds la tete," said Christian to Martin jovially. You've lost your mind.

  "There is a way," said Martin, and in the sallow lantern light, looked about the circle like a schoolmarm to see if anyone who did not know the plan could guess.

  "By train," I answered.

  "Bravo, Dubin."

  My clue was Martin's background. Members of his former union, the International Transport Workers, were so thoroughly committed to resistance that before D-Day the Germans had been required to take over the French railroads, importing nearly 50,000 rail men from Germany. As the Allies advanced, however, most of these civilian crews had been shipped home, or had simply deserted. While the rail yards remained heavily patrolled, the Nazis had had no choice but again to let Frenchmen run the trains in the corner of France the Germans controlled.

  This evening, mechanics at the yard in Dieuze, a few miles farther east, would conclude that the arriving locomotive on a Nazi supply train needed repairs. It would be steered toward the mechanical facility at the distant side of the yard, and would slowly roll right through. A mile farther on, Antonio would board, replacing the engineer and the rest of the crew, and steam off toward the dump. In the morning, after the operation, the local reseau would tie up the crew members, leaving them in the bushes along the right-of-way, where, upon discovery, th
ey would claim to have been set upon by dozens of saboteurs many hours before.

  Martin expected no trouble with any of that. If there were to be problems, they were more likely to come at La Saline Royale. If the Germans here realized what was happening, they would blow or blockade the trestle leading to the mine, so stealth was essential. There were two guards at a switching point, set up roughly a mile and a half from where we were now, to keep unauthorized traffic off the spur. They had to be quietly subdued. After that, a distraction on the other side of the works would obscure the sounds of the approaching locomotive. That was Henri and Christian's task.

  "Ever seen one of these?" Around the circle Martin handed an object about the size of an apple, Army green, with yellow stenciling that said M. From the ring on top, I could tell it was a hand grenade, but twice as big as any other I'd seen.

  "It's called a Beano. I have damn few left, too. Like a grenade but with one great advantage. Blows on impact. No one kicks this out of the way or throws it in the river. And if you have to hold on to it after you pull the ring, you can. I wouldn't walk around with it in my pocket, mind you, but I've carried one along for several minutes."

  The Beano--actually two of them--were for Christian and Henri. We would all initially approach from the south, ascending the hills behind the saltworks, with Christian and Henri then fanning off toward the front gates. They had grenade-launcher attachments for their Mrs, which, even firing something the size of the Beano, would have a range of one hundred yards. Their target was the gasoline tanks that serviced the garrison. If the fuel ignited, all troops would rush out there to extinguish the flames burning perilously close to the wooden entrance to the shafts and the tons of munitions below. But even if the father and son missed, the Germans could be expected to rouse off-duty troops to begin combing the overlooking hills. In the meantime, the locomotive would speed across the trestle, crash the railroad crossing gate, and hurtle down into the mine. There was a chance that the impact of the locomotive with the train cars loaded with shells might detonate them, but rather than count on that, Martin was packing a satchel charge whose fuse he would light before jumping from the train.

  The explosion inside the mine would act more or less like a pipe bomb, with the shafts channeling the huge force of the blast from either end. If we made it back over and down the hill from which we'd come, we would escape unharmed. Martin didn't address his own safety, but I couldn't see how he'd get away, since he had to remain on the locomotive to steer it over the trestle. As for Biddy and me, Martin planned for us to wait on the hillside. We would have a clear view of his activities, but would need only a few seconds to get back over the top and down.

  "But be alert for Krauts," Martin told us. "They may be out by then, looking for the saboteurs who fired the grenades.), We would start again at 5:00 a. M. That left about six hours to sleep, but I was much too excited to try.

  Ready to turn in, Gita came to check on me. She remained concerned that she had told me too much with her stories about Bettjer.

  "I am fine," I told her. "I am sure that before I sleep, I will think of those I have left at home and feel bad about that, as soldiers do. But I am pleased finally to know a little of what soldiers feel."

  "I have that luck," she said. "No home." She dug a stick into the ground and pondered it. "Robert does not like talk of home," she said quietly. "He says it is not good for soldiers. But it would be unnatural to forget, no?"

  "Of course," I said.

  She did not look up, but smiled wistfully as she turned over clods.

  "Did I tell you, Dubin, that my mother was killed for harboring Jews?"

  "Certainly not. You have not mentioned she was a hero.,, "No," Gita answered decisively. "She was no heroine. She did it for money. She hated the Nazis, naturally. She worried constantly that they would send me to Germany to be made German as had been done with dozens of the Polish children in my town. But a man, Szymon Goldstein, came to her when the Nazis began rounding up the Jews and deporting them to Lublin. Goldstein ran a tannery and had been rich before the war. And was once my mother's lover, as well. Their affair had ended badly, as my mother's affairs tended to do. They were gruff with each other, but she was the only Pole he knew who might be daring enough to take his money. It was a huge sum. And even so, Dubin, I was very much against this. But my mother always refused to do what other people considered wise.

  "So in the middle of the night, Goldstein and his wife and his four children stole into our tiny house and lived in our little root cellar. For the month it lasted, it made for a strange household--my mother under the same roof with Madame Goldstein, who despised her, these six people whose noises we always heard from below like mice in the walls. Then they were betrayed. The Nazis found another Jew who had been hiding in the woods. To save himself, he told them about Goldstein. The SS came into the house and found my mother and all the Goldsteins and shot them. I was out trying to find coal that day. When I came back the bodies were piled in front of the door, as a warning to anyone who might do the same.

  "I have always thought, if only I had come back in time I could have saved them. But I have no idea how. Naturally enough, people say I am lucky not to have died with them, yet how can one remember such a thing with any feeling of good fortune?" She had been driving the stick into the ground all the time she told this story. "So what do you think, Dubin?"

  "I think it is a terrible story. It makes me very sad for you."

  "Yes." She said nothing for a moment, then finally cast her stick aside. "So tonight we both think of home before we are soldiers." She grasped my hand for a second, before moving off to her bedroll.

  I was grateful to hear Gita's story, a powerful reminder of why we were fighting, but it had not brought me any closer to sleep. Instead, I watched Martin pack the satchel charges. He had a bottle of brandy, which he offered to me, and I took a long pull in the hope that it would make me weary. Martin was clearly going to finish off the rest himself. That did not strike me as wise, but his hands were still nimble assembling the charge. It was essentially dynamite, sixteen square blocks of TNT fixed in sawdust, each weighing more than a pound. Martin would strap them around a blasting cap, but first he had to prepare the fuse. He stood outside, lighting and relighting varying lengths, recording how fast they were consumed. He planned to hang the satchel charges in the windows of the locomotive cab, so that the explosions had the maximum effect, but timing was essential. If the charges went too quickly, they'd drop the locomotive into the Seille; too late and the Germans might have time to extinguish the flame. I held the ends of the lines for him, watching the flame sparkle toward me. Nine feet, six inches, is what he ultimately figured. It would give him about four minutes to escape. When he was done, at last, he carefully slid the charges into a green canvas sack.

  "Time to turn in," he told me. He clapped me on the shoulder. "Exciting, eh?"

  "Major," I said, "I'd like to do more than watch.), "You're here as an observer, Dubin."

  "Frankly, sir, if something goes wrong, I don't think the Germans will care why we're here. We might as well take part."

  "We'll see. Sleep now." He smiled. "You can carry the satchel in the morning. Damn heavy, too."

  Biddy had brought a pup tent for the two of us. There was a strange domestic order in that. I thought of myself as tidy, but Bidwell was downright precise: boots, weapon, pack, in perfect rank. As a boy who'd grown up sleeping with my brother in the kitchen in my parents' small apartment, I sometimes thought I'd feel more at home in the closeness of enlisted quarters. Crossing the ocean, while the officers lived in style in our staterooms, the enlisted men below slept in shifts on rows of canvas bunks suspended between the posts every two feet like shelving. Their deck was tight as a hive, which made the perpetual good cheer of the troops there more remarkable--and enviable.

  I crept in now and found paper and a pencil in my field jacket and stood outside to write quick letters to Grace and my parents by firelight. There was al
most no chance the mail would be delivered if something went wrong, but it was a ritual I felt obliged to carry out. With that done, I crawled into the tent. Quiet as I'd been, I'd apparently roused Bidwell.

  "Permission to speak, sir?" Biddy rarely invoked these formalities. "Lieutenant," he said, "you got me wrong today. And it's been weighin on my mind. About that Negro soldier I didn't talk to? I don't feel no better than him, Lieutenant. Not one bit. He knew my momma and daddy and there was some ruction at home I didn't want to hear tell about. But it wasn't 'cause I looked down at him for being colored. I swear."

  There'd been too many incidents, but this was hardly the time for a debating society.

  "I'm glad to hear that, Biddy."

  "Yes, sir."

  We said no more then.

  Chapter 11.

  ACTION

  I awoke from a dream of music. Biddy was up already, organizing his pack, and we took down the tent together. "I dreamed I was playing the clarinet, Biddy."

  "Was that your thing, that old licorice stick?"

  "It was. Not much of an embouchure left now. I thought I was Benny Goodman, Gideon. I just couldn't find anybody to agree."

  He laughed and we talked about music. I asked which musicians he liked.

  "Duke," he said. "Pretty niftic."

  "I'll say."

  "Did you have a group, Lieutenant?"

  Here in the hills of Lorraine, about to take my first intentional risks since going to war, I felt the embrace of the summer nights when we played on Mo Freeman's front stoop. The neighbors had been less than enthusiastic when we were freshmen, but by the time we reached our senior year we used to draw a little crowd.

  "Killer-diller," I said, repeating the compliment we once gave one another on our improvisations. "Haven't played like that in years."

  "What happened to you-all?"

  "Oh, the world began to get in the way. I went off to Easton College. Mo deserved the scholarship more than me, but he was colored. He ended up okay, though. I saw him before I left. You know, that little tour we all made of the folks we wanted to remember us if anything happened? He went to medical school at the U. Two coloreds in his class, but he was past the rough part. He's done by now He was laughing because the draft board didn't know what to do with him. They weren't going to take a colored doctor. If he's over here, it's as a damn private in the Negro troops. And that's not right, Biddy."