Ordinary Heroes

  "No, sir, it ain't, it surely ain't." I had a hard time believing I'd made a convert overnight, but he sounded sincere.

  Antonio had been gone for more than two hours now The remaining six of us moved out a little after 5:3o a. M., careful as we climbed into the first hills. At one point when we stopped, Henri pointed to a stork's nest, the size of a harvest basket, on the roof of a farmhouse beside a small lake.

  Halfway up the hill behind the saltworks, we parted with Henri and Christian. Each of us took turns wishing them well.

  "Merde," answered Henri. I don't believe I'd heard another word from him in twelve hours. In the dark, they would assume positions on an adjoining hill to the north. The Germans walked the walled perimeter of the works in daylight, but at night, they relied on sentries posted in towers. If Henri and Christian were quiet, they could pitch down their grenades and be gone almost instantly. The wall would end up protecting them from the German forces, who would be a long time getting outside.

  To signal Henri and Christian to fire, Martin would blow the locomotive whistle once, indicating that the guards at the switch had been dispatched. The Germans were unlikely to make much of the sound coming from the main line, but one minute later, the grenades would explode among the salt barns.

  Without his guides, Martin touched a button on the tunic he wore beneath his field jacket and a compass popped open on his chest, mounted upside down so he could read the phosphorescent dial. Until now I'd been so absorbed with my own apprehensions that I had largely forgotten why I'd come.

  But witnessing the elaborateness of the plans, the ingenious OSS gizmos with which Martin had been supplied, and the extensive cooperation from local elements, it was beyond doubt that Martin was acting under OSS command. Whether it was political prejudice or egotism or simply miscommunication amid the smoke of war, Teedle was plainly wrong.

  The separation from Henri and Christian had brought a new gravity to both Martin and Gita, who led us in heavy silence as we ascended. Every now and then Martin took a strip of cloth from his sack and tied it to the bough of a buckthorn or other small tree, marking the way back. I wasn't certain if the sky was brightening a trace, with perhaps an hour to dawn, or if my. eyes had adjusted to the dark, but smoky puffs of fog were visible beneath the cloud cover. When we made the crest, Martin reached out to take the satchel charge from Bidwell. I'd labored with it, and Biddy had grabbed it from me, toting it along as if it were no heavier than a lunch bucket.

  "Gentlemen," said Martin, "here we part. I suggest you continue down perhaps a hundred yards. You'll be able to see our activities clearly. Again, eye out for Krauts."

  "And if we wish to help?" I asked.

  Martin shrugged, as if it were no matter to him. "I'm sure Gita could use a hand in Bettjer's place." I looked at Biddy. He had a straightforward analysis. "Seems to me we're a helluva lot better off, Lieutenant, stayin with folks who know what-all they're doin."

  I could see Martin had anticipated these responses, not because there was anything special about Biddy, or me, but because there wasn't. It was a tribute to our soldiers, most of whom would have made the same choice.

  Before saying goodbye, Martin loosened the chin-strap on my helmet.

  "You don't want that around your neck when the dump goes, Dubin. It could garotte you. Follow Gita," he said. "She'll give you directions."

  Our role was to cover Martin. We edged our way down the hill behind him. At the foot, we were on the plain beside the Seille, still a quarter mile south and east of the switching point. The train tracks lay before us, and we dashed across one at a time, plunging into the heavy growth on the riverbank. Gita followed Martin, and I followed her; Biddy was at my back. It was slow going. Martin pulled aside the branches as if parting a heavy curtain, but there were still thorns that grabbed my clothes and clawed my face, and I stumbled several times on the soft ground. We crept along this way for half an hour until Martin suddenly stopped, one hand aloft.

  He had caught sight ahead of the two Germans guarding the switch. They were kids, of course. They sat on two ammunition crates, using a third as a table while they played cards, betting cigarettes and cursing fate with each hand. They were in full uniform, wearing their Dutch-boy helmets. Their rifles were slung across their backs and would be inaccessible just long enough to make it easy to overtake them, four soldiers on two. With hand signals, Martin drew a plan in the air. He was going to continue until he was behind the two sentries. When he erupted from the bushes, ordering them to surrender, the three of us would rush forward to surround them.

  Martin had gone about ten paces, mincing through the underbrush, when he again stilled. The soldiers remained occupied with their game, but after another second, I heard what Martin had: the rising clatter of the locomotive.

  The two Germans noticed the racket down the track at the same time, both standing and swinging their rifles into their hands. I would have thought they'd have an established drill with passing trains, but they had been taken by surprise and they shouted at each other while they tried to decide what to do. One galloped down the track, coming within a few feet of our hiding place in the brush as he raced toward the sound of the engine, which remained around the bend of the hill. The other watched over his shoulder as he wandered toward his radio. He was headed directly to the spot where Martin was hidden in the greenery along the bank.

  Martin killed him quickly. He was as expert as his stories suggested. As soon as the soldier turned again to check on his comrade, Martin slipped from the bushes, loping in a peculiar side-to-side crouch, meant either to cushion his footfalls or to make him less visible if his sound was detected. When he neared the boy, he tossed a pebble to draw the soldier's attention forward. The German had raised his rifle in that direction when Martin caught him from behind, circling a length of wire around his windpipe. He snatched it taut, dumped the soldier on his seat, and braced his knee in the boy's back as he finished him. The only sound throughout was of the boy's heavy boots thumping on the ground, hardened by the native salt deposits.

  I had watched the mangled, eviscerated, and limbless men who came off the Red Cross vehicles in Nancy, and I'd encountered corpses now and then, as on the day with Colonel Maples, but I'd seen a man die only once before, when I'd been sent as the departmental representative to a hanging. I had looked away immediately when I heard the trap sprung. But now the moment of death struck me as far more ordinary than I might have thought. Life was headed toward this instant and we all knew it, no matter how much we willed ourselves to forget. Wiping the wire on his gloves before returning it to the side pocket of his combat jacket, Robert Martin was the master of that knowledge. He appeared entirely unaltered by what he'd done.

  Instead, he waved us forward, while he went flying down the track toward the locomotive. By the time we arrived, the other German soldier was on the ground with his face covered in blood. Antonio had stopped the engine on the young soldier's orders, then smashed the boy across the cheek with a wrench as soon as he tried to mount the ladder to the cab. He was moaning now, a low guttural sound from deep within his body. From the looks of it, I wasn't sure he was going to live, but Martin stuffed a handful of leaves into the long gash that was once the boy's mouth, and bound him with the laces of the low rawhide boots he'd worn under gaiters.

  Then we stood in silence beside the enormous steam-driven machine that Antonio and the reseau had stolen. It was the height of at least four men and probably one hundred feet long, with six sets of steel wheels polished by the tracks, and a black boiler right behind its front light. Unlike American trains, the turbine was exposed. But there was little time to admire it. Martin's gesture set Gita running, and Biddy and I sprinted behind her. When I looked back, Antonio and Martin were leaning together to free the switch.

  We retraced our path, running back along the riverbank as fast as the undergrowth would allow. A hundred yards on, behind a bend in the wall, we crossed the track again and headed up the hill, climbing on all
fours to a path that rose steeply along the ridgeline.

  Three or four minutes after leaving Martin, we heard the long lowing of the locomotive whistle. The train was on its way. I counted to sixty as we ran, and the detonations of Henri and Christian's grenades followed precisely. We were close enough to the saltworks to hear the cries of alarm go up in the German garrison--shouting and a siren pealing--and to see color against the low clouds. We continued upward until we could look down on the works and the trestle, two hundred yards from the railroad gate Martin was preparing to attack. Only one of the machine guns looked to be manned. Inside the high walls, the red flames were partially visible, and in that light, we could see the anthill swirl of soldiers pouring in that direction.

  The locomotive lumbered around the bend then, moving at no more than ten miles an hour as it rocked on the old rail bed. The three machine-gun crewmen had turned to watch the fire, but the train sounds caught the attention of one of them. He stepped toward the trestle with his hands on his waist, an idle spectator for a lingering second, and then, with no transition, an image of urgent action waving wildly to his comrades, having suddenly recognized that the grenades and the locomotive bearing down on them were part of the same attack.

  Watching from above, I briefly panicked when I realized what would happen if the gunners were smart enough to begin firing at the trestle. Delivering nine hundred rounds a minute, the MG42s probably could have damaged the ties enough to derail the train, maybe even to send it into the Seille. But they'd clearly given that alternative no forethought and prepared to take out their attackers more directly. One soldier steadied the MG42 on its tripod, while the gunner put on his helmet and the third crewman strung out the ammunition belt. Beside us, Gita raised her MI and whipped her chin to indicate Biddy and I should move apart. Before the Germans could fire, we began shooting down at them. We did not have the range at first, and the gunners suddenly swung the MG4z in our direction. As the long muzzle crossed my plane of vision my entire body squeezed in fear and I started firing frantically, until one of our bullets, maybe even mine, took down the gunner. With that, the other two retreated inside the walls, dragging the fallen man behind them.

  When I lowered the carbine, I found my heart banging furiously and my lungs out of breath. I was at war. In war. The momentousness of it rang through me, but already, with just this instant to reflect, I felt the first whisper of disappointment. Below, the locomotive went down the trestle like a waddling hen, the burning fuse of the satchel charge now visible in the cab window.

  I caught sight of Martin then, rolling along the right-of-way between the river and the high wall of the saltworks. As the engine rumbled past him, he sprang back to his feet and sprinted down the track, taking advantage of the cover provided by the huge iron machine. Once he was beyond the curve of the wall, he swung his rucksack around him and removed two lengths of rope, both secured to grappling hooks, which he dug into the crotches of two small trees. Bracing himself that way, he backed to the edge of the river, and then, without hesitation, skidded down the concrete retaining wall on the bank, disappearing into the water.

  Suddenly, a gun barked on my left. I flinched before I heard Biddy crying out. He was shooting, and Gita immediately joined him. A gunner had returned to the other MG42. I fired, too, the jolting rifle once escaping my shoulder and recoiling painfully against my cheek, but in a moment the man was back inside the walls. One of the Germans had closed the low iron gate, but it was thin and presented no obstruction to the locomotive that crashed through it, headed for its descent into the mine. With a little shout, Gita signaled us to run.

  Once we were beyond the crest, Gita dropped to her knees and threw herself down the hill in a ball. I fell where she had started but ended up spinning sideways into a tree stump. Biddy came somersaulting by, bumping along like a boulder. I dashed several feet, then tripped and accomplished what I had meant to, rolling on my side down the hill, landing painfully and bouncing forward.

  In the midst of that, I heard an enormous echo of screaming metal piped out of the tunnel and knew the locomotive had barreled into the loaded flatcars. In the reality of physicists, there were actually two detonations, the satchel charges and then the ordnance, but my experience was of a single sensational roar that brought full daylight and fireside heat and bore me aloft. I was flying through the air for a full second, then landed hard. Looking up, I saw giant pillars of flame beyond the hilltop, and nearby a corkscrew of smoking black iron, a piece of the locomotive, that had knifed straight into the earth, as if it were an arrow. My knee, inexplicably, was throbbing.

  "Cover up," Biddy yelled. My helmet had been blown off. I saw it back up the incline, but a fountain of dirt and stone and hot metal began showering around me. Debris fell for more than a minute, tree boughs and shell pieces that plummeted through the air with a sound like a wolf whistle, and a pelting downpour of river water and the heavy mud of the bank. At the end came a twinkling of sawdust and the tatters of leaves. I had crawled halfway to my helmet when there was a second explosion that blew me back down to where I had been at first. The concussion was less violent, but the flames reached higher into the sky and the hot remains of what had been destroyed rained down even longer.

  I still had my hands over my head when Gita slapped my bottom. I jumped instantly and found her laughing. "Allons-y!" She took off down the hillside. Biddy was already in motion and I sprinted behind them. He moved well for a man his size, but lacked endurance. I had retained some of the lung strength of a swimmer and eventually pulled past him, but I was no match for Gita, who flew along like a fox past the strips of cloth Martin had tied, stopping only when we reached the edge of the last open farm field we'd crossed this morning. At the margin of a small woods, Gita scouted for signs of the Germans, but we all knew that the blast that had roared out of the tunnel, as from a dragon's mouth, had to have devastated the garrison. Biddy arrived and laid his hands on his thighs, panting.

  "What about Martin?" I asked her, when she signaled we were secure.

  "We never worry about Martin," she said. "Because he is safe?"

  "Because it could drive one to lunacy. Regarde." Across the field, Henri and Christian were ambling toward us, both so thoroughly relieved of their prior grimness that I failed to recognize them at first. They had ditched their rifles to appear more innocuous, and approached in their muddy boots and soaked overalls, smiling broadly. Henri, it turned out, lacked most of his upper teeth. They hugged Gita first, then both embraced Biddy and me. Henri virtually wrested me from my feet, and isolated within his powerful grasp and his warm husky scent, I felt the first stirrings of pride at the magnitude of our achievement and my own small role in it.

  "We showed them," Henri said in French. The way back to the shepherd's but was safe, he said. There they had built a fire and filled a cistern with water from a nearby spring, and we all sat on the ground, drinking and warming ourselves, while we waited for Antonio and Martin. As we recounted the operation in a jumble of conversation, every spark of shared memory seemed to make each of us hilarious, but there was truly only one joke: we were alive.

  When I was warmer, I hiked up my woolen pants leg to see what I had done to my knee. There was a gash, only an inch wide but deep, a smile amid a large purple welt. I had no clue how it had happened. Prodding the edges of the wound, I could feel nothing inside.

  "For this a Purple Heart?" Gita asked Biddy in English, when she saw me toying with the injury. I had found my first-aid kit in my field-jacket pocket and Gita helped me wash the cut with a little of the gauze in there. Across the cut, she dumped a dusting of sulfa powder out of a packet, then skillfully fashioned a bandage from the remaining gauze. Wrapping my knee, she told me that it would be a week or so before I danced in the Follies again.

  Your nursing skills are impressive, Mademoiselle Lodz. How were you trained?"

  "In Marseilles, in the hospital, I watched and learned."

  "Is that what drew you to the hospital, a
vocation for nursing?"

  "Far from it. I wanted to steal opium." She smiled. regally. More than anything, Gita Lodz enjoyed being shocking, and in me, she had easy prey.

  "You were a drug fiend?"

  "A bit. To dull the pain. Principally, I sold to opium dens. War is very hard on those people, Dubin. I survived on their desperation--until I met Robert. But I am a good nurse. I have what is required, a strong stomach and a soft heart. Even someone whom I would despise were he in good health moves me as an invalid."

  "A bit of a paradox, is it not? To be a soldier and a nurse?

  Her small shoulders turned indifferently.

  "I told you, Dubin, I do not fight to kill. Or conquer.

  "So why, then?"

  She pulled my pants leg down to my boot and smoothed it there. Then she sat back on her haunches.

  "I will tell you how it has been with me, Dubin. I have fought because the Nazis are wrong and we are right and the Nazis must lose. But I also fight death. I see it in the barrel of every gun, in the figure of every Boche, and when they are defeated, I think each time: Today I may live. Tu comprends?" She finished off by giving her full brows a comic wiggle, but her coffee eyes had been lethally intent. I knew she thought she had told me something remarkable, but I did not really grasp it. Right now I felt the thrill of surviving in all my limbs, as if I'd acquired the strength of ten.

  "I fear I am too dense to fully understand, Mademoiselle."

  "No, Dubin, it does not mean you are slow-witted." She stood with a sealed smile. "It means you are lucky."