Fire and Steel, Volume 2 Read online

  “Of course I’m upset,” he snapped. “The November Criminals are destroying all that we fought for. Germany is crumbling all around us, and no one is doing anything.”

  That was a blatant overstatement, but she let it pass. “I know, Hans. I know. And I believe Adolf’s right. The state of our country upsets me a great deal too.”

  “Then why does it bother you if I see him? He’s a brave man. Did you know that he has been awarded two Iron Crosses? Two!”

  “I didn’t know that. But I wasn’t questioning his bravery, Hans. And it doesn’t bother me if you see him. But I’m wondering if it not’s bothering you. When you first came to the hospital, you had nightmares almost every night. Then gradually, they started to go away. But I’ve noticed that on the days when you talk with him, the bad dreams seem to come back.”

  That mollified Hans a little, but he still seemed irritated. “Well, you don’t have to worry about it. He was discharged this morning. By now, he’s back in Munich. That’s where he was going.”

  “Oh.” And tomorrow morning you’re going to be released, and you’ll go back to Bavaria. Which does worry me. But she caught herself and only asked, “So you liked him?”

  “Very much.” Then, to her surprise, a smile spread slowly across his face. “Except for that ridiculous mustache of his.”

  She had to laugh. “He seemed very proud of it. My friend said he combed it several times each day to make sure the handlebars on each side were in perfect balance.” She suppressed a giggle. “Anyway, not having your discussions anymore may help you sleep better.”

  Hans’s smile instantly vanished. “Why do you insist on blaming him for my nightmares?” Before she could respond, he rushed on. “Do you know who Friedrich Nietzsche is?”

  “No, Hans,” she shot back, “I don’t know who the most famous of all German philosophers is.”

  He ignored her sarcasm. “Nietzsche once said: ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become himself a monster.’”

  “Yes, I know that quote.”

  “Well, maybe that’s where my nightmares are coming from, Emilee. Not Adolf Hitler, but from the monster the army has created in me over the last four years.” He lay back. “Give that some thought as my nurse, why don’t you.”

  Stung by the sharpness in him, she stood up. “I’m sorry, Hans. I didn’t mean it that way.” But then her own irritation flared up. “But Nietzsche also said something like, ‘Out of chaos are born the stars that dance in the night.’”

  His eyes widened a little. “Actually, the quote is, ‘One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.’” He flashed a thin smile at her. “And what’s a girl like you doing quoting Friedrich Nietzsche?”

  “A girl like me?” she repeated, her voice cool. “You mean the little working-class girl who got a nursing degree so she could read books to patients who got their education at”—her voice was suddenly mocking—“the Von Kruger Academy of Academic Excellence?”

  “Hey,” he said, instantly contrite. “I was just trying to be funny.”

  “No you weren’t.”

  That rocked him back a little, but then he nodded. “No, I wasn’t. I felt like you were treating me like a little kid, and so. . . .”

  “You wanted to make me feel like a little kid,” she finished for him.

  “Yeah, I guess I did. I’m sorry. Okay? Sorry to be so grumpy tonight.”

  “And I am sorry as well.” She sat down again. They were silent for a long moment. She knew there was no way she could talk about the letters right now. And yet she felt that thirty-hour clock ticking away behind her. So she had another thought. It took her a little by surprise—even shocked her some. But it was another way to maybe find out what she needed to know.

  She took a quick breath. Okay. Here we go. I know that the war was unbelievably horrible for you. And I think that after working in a military hospital for the last two years, I have some small glimpse of that chaos you’re talking about. Will you tell me about it?”

  He stared at her, not seeming to comprehend.

  “I know this is going to sound strange. But in a way I’m envious of what you have learned from it all. I have often asked myself, ‘Would I have the courage to go into battle? Would I give my life for a cause greater than myself?’ I don’t know the answer to that. But you do. I didn’t know you before, but I believe that you are a changed man, Hans. A better man, a stronger and more courageous man for it. And maybe that’s the dancing star that’s being created from the chaos of war.”

  He swore. “Don’t be naive, Emilee. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  She said nothing, a sudden bleakness coming over her. “You’re right, Hans,” she murmured. “I’m sorry.” She got to her feet. “I’d better go now. It’s time to start my rounds.” She spun on her heel and started away. She only got three steps before she whirled back around. “Here’s another quote of Nietzsche’s from the quaint little girl from Pasewalk. ‘To live is to suffer. To survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’ Good-bye, Hans.” And she started away again.

  “I had a best friend named Franck Zolger,” he said as she walked away. His voice was low, almost a whisper.

  She stopped and slowly turned to face him again.

  “We were in basic training together, and then we were assigned to the same transportation unit and drove trucks together for a couple of years. We were even closer than some brothers.”

  Emilee returned to her chair and sat down, folding her hands in her lap and staring at them, afraid that if she looked at him he would stop.

  “We were delivering a load of supplies to the front line in Verdun. This was after the battle had been raging for months. The morning we were getting ready to return to our unit and load up again, this major came up to us. He was a real aristocrat. Acted like he was the son of a count or something. Anyway, he commandeered me and Franck.”

  “Commandeered? What does that mean?”

  “He made us leave the keys to the truck on the front seat, told us to grab our rifles, and marched us off to the front lines. He said they needed every man up there to turn back the French.”

  “But what about your other unit? What did your commanding officer there say?”

  He shrugged. “He was fifteen miles away. Nobody asked him.” Hans hooted in disgust. “He probably thinks Franck and I deserted, for all I know.”

  “So you went into the trenches?”

  Hans nodded. After a moment, he went on. “A day or two later—or maybe it was a week or a month or a century—we were sent out on a recon patrol. A reconnaissance mission. Oh, how we hated that word! Recon. Some fat old sergeant would call us in and say, ‘We need to recon where the enemy is.’ Which meant, ‘Go out and get the French and the British to shoot at you so we know where they are.’ So we did.

  “We left that night at about twenty-two hundred hours—ten o’clock. It was January. January 6, 1917, to be exact. The night was pitch black, and there were four or five inches of snow on the ground. So we wandered around all night, freezing our tails off, and found absolutely nothing. We knew if we went back too early, our platoon sergeant would kick us from there to the south of France, but we were so numb with cold we couldn’t go on anymore. So we sat down to kill some time until we dared to report back in to the sergeant.”

  He closed his eyes and looked away.

  “Tell me, Hans,” she whispered. “Please.”

  “We were seated on this little rise where we could watch the forest below—forest, ha! Most of the trees had been blown to smithereens by that time. But we were still in enemy territory and fully alert. I was sitting next to Franck, maybe a foot or two away from him. I remember watching my breath explode in puffs of mist and then hang there in the frosty air for what seemed like forever. It was so bizarre. Such delicate beauty in a world of shattered trees and shell holes and the ever-present stench of death. Well, anyway, we were sitting
there griping about life in the army and arrogant majors and fat platoon sergeants and . . .”

  His chest was rising and falling visibly now. “There was the crack of a rifle shot. It was fifty, maybe a hundred yards away. From that distance it sounds like someone smacking a piece of wood against a tree stump. I yelled and dove face first into the snow just as a second shot snapped over my head. “Franck!” I yelled. “Get down! Get down!”

  Hans’s voice broke, and his shoulders began to shake. “But he was already down. He was lying on his back, staring up at the sky, his eyes. . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t get the image of his eyes out of my head. There was no pain in them at all. Just . . . surprise. Like someone had snuck up behind him and poked him with a stick. For a moment I thought he was just being his goofy self, and then I saw the hole in his chest and . . . and the blood. His whole tunic was this mass of dark red.”

  Emilee wanted to reach out and take his hand or touch his cheek, but she sensed that if she did he would stop talking. So she sat there, feeling sicker and sicker to her stomach.

  “One moment we were joking and griping, and then . . .” He turned and looked at her, flicked at the air with the back of his hand, as if shooing away a fly. “Poof! Just like that, he was gone.” It was so casual, and such an utterly chilling way to describe a man’s death.

  Hans closed his eyes and laid back on his pillow. Emilee reached out and laid a hand on his. For two or three minutes they sat like that, him silent, her blinking back tears.

  “I was so angry,” he finally went on, “that I could barely mourn for him.”

  “Angry at God?” she whispered.

  “Yes. And at the world. At the sniper who shot him. At the sergeant who sent us out there. At that imperious major who ripped us from the safety of our trucks. But yes, mostly at God. Why didn’t He warn me we were walking into a trap? Why did He let that French sniper take the first shot at Franck? I was the squad leader. He had to have seen me in the lead.” Hans looked over at Emilee. “I know this is an awful thing to say, because all of my squad members were good men, but I would have traded any one of them for Franck without a second thought.”

  “I am so sorry, Hans.” It sounded ridiculous, but what could one say to adequately respond to such random and meaningless horror?

  “I never got to see him buried. Don’t even know where they took him. Maybe they never did bury him. When I dropped his body off at the field hospital, they sent me right back into the line to stop the attacking French. Maybe he’s still out there. His frozen body lying behind a tent.”

  Not knowing what to say, Emilee said nothing. She just clung to his hand, and he to hers, for a long, long moment.

  And then he took a deep breath and continued. “As the months went on, I found myself changing. Oh, I was still angry with whatever God there may be in the heavens, but it wasn’t because Franck had been killed anymore. It was because Franck had been killed, and I hadn’t. I even found myself resenting Franck. How come he had been the lucky one? He got his discharge two years before the war ended. Probably never felt a thing. And I was the one left behind.”

  He turned and looked at Emilee. His mouth was twisted into a smile, but it was cold and bitter. “Is that the chaos that you’re hoping will create my dancing star?” he asked.

  “Hans, I. . . .”

  “I can’t tell you how many times I lay out there in the cold and the muck, bullets snapping overhead and mustard gas rolling down the hill at us like some living monster, and cursed God for taking Franck and not me.”

  Hans’s head was turned so that the lamplight fell on his face and softly illuminated it. Now Emilee could see that his eyes—normally so blue that they reminded her of the morning sky—were dark and brooding and the color of glacial ice. Finally, he looked up at her. “I remember enduring an endless artillery bombardment that went on for ninety-six hours. Ninety-six hours! Think of it. That’s four straight days without letup! Shells going off every thirty to forty seconds. We were all going slowly mad. Suddenly, I leaped out of my foxhole, threw back my arms, and bared my face to the sky. Shells were screeching overhead. Explosions shook the ground. Shrapnel was flying around me as if someone had kicked over a hornets’ nest. I stood there for a moment, and then I shook my fist at the sky and screamed at God. ‘Take me! I dare you. I’m here. Take me now!’”

  “Were you hit by any of the shrapnel?”

  “Not a scratch. I must have stood out there for two or three minutes—screaming, ranting, cursing. And nothing. And then it came to me. I realized why nothing was happening. Because God wasn’t there. I was screaming into a void.”

  “And my thought was just the opposite,” she said quietly.

  “What?” He turned, blinking at her.

  “You went through an artillery barrage without a scratch. Maybe God was protecting you.”

  “Ha!” he cried. “If He was, why didn’t He protect me when we were being shelled by our own artillery and I ran for help? Answer that one, if you can.”

  She hesitated and then decided his question demanded an answer. “You came out of it alive,” she said. “You didn’t lose a leg or an arm. You came within a fraction of an inch of having your optic nerve severed, but it was spared.”

  He was staring at her, shocked that she would dare to question his anger, his agony. “It was just pure luck,” he muttered. “God had nothing to do with it.”

  “Why is it that we always curse God when bad things happen to us, but when good things happen, it’s good luck or a happy coincidence? Maybe—” She felt her face go instantly hot and hoped the light was dim enough that he couldn’t see it. “Just maybe the Lord let you get wounded that day so that you would be brought to a military hospital in the far north of Germany, hundreds of miles away from your home. Maybe there was someone there you were supposed to meet.”

  “I. . . .” He clamped his mouth shut again.

  Emilee managed an embarrassed smile. “I see that my boldness has left you speechless.”

  “I. . . .” Then, to her surprise, he laughed. “You’re kind of feisty, aren’t you?”

  “Far too feisty, according to my mother.” She got to her feet. “Now, Hans, I really do have to do my next rounds or my supervisor is going to come hunting for me.”

  Before he could protest, she hurried on. “But I need to tell you something really quickly.” And she told him about the note that was in his chart.

  That shocked him into silence. “So tomorrow morning?” He finally asked.

  “Yes. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “Will you be there? Can you stay after you get off your shift?” He gave her a sly look. “Because the moment I am released as a patient here, you have no excuse for not giving me your address and phone number.”

  “Today is my day off, so I don’t work tonight. But, yes, if I can, I’ll come back on Monday. However, my mother is coming to visit me today. To celebrate the beginning of Advent.”

  That caught him by surprise. “Advent? Is it Advent already?”

  “Yes, it is. It begins the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and that’s today. I’m not sure yet how long she will be staying, probably through Wednesday or Thursday, but I think I can slip away long enough to be here to congratulate you on your discharge.”

  “And give me your address and phone number?”

  She smiled coyly. “Yes.”

  He fell back on the pillow, genuinely pleased. “And when I walk out of the administrator’s office, I won’t be a patient here anymore, will I?”

  “No,” she said slowly, feeling her pulse quicken a little. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because the minute we step out of those doors, I’m going to ask you if you would consider letting me take you out to dinner or—”

  “Yes, I would.” Now it felt as if her face were glowing in the dark. Her forwardness was taking her breath away.

  His eyes widened. “And if I were to ask if I might come and meet your—”

  �
��Yes, you can.”

  He was ecstatic. “Really?”

  She laughed softly. “Yes, really. And now, Sergeant Eckhardt,” she said in an officious tone, “no more questions. I have to do my rounds and you need to sleep.”

  He wiggled deeper under his covers, grinning up at her. “I am tired. Will you stop and see me when you’re off shift?”

  As he asked that question, Emilee started to put her hands in her pocket. As she did so, her hand touched the envelopes again. She actually started, remembering her determination to get to the bottom of this. And then came a flash of inspiration. “Hans, I have a better idea. There is one other thing that I would like to talk to you about.” She was blushing yet again. She couldn’t believe how brazen she was being. “Breakfast isn’t served until eight. What if I met you in the solarium at ten after seven, after I’m off? There’s usually no one there that early. It will only take a few minutes.”

  His grin was like an electric torch in the darkness. “Nurse Fromme,” he said with great solemnity, “you tell me when and where, and I don’t care how far it is or how hard it is to get there, I will be there. Verstehen?”

  She laughed. “Yes, I understand.” She touched his hand briefly and then hurried away.

  Chapter Notes

  Almost everyone is familiar with Adolf Hitler’s iconic mustache that he wore throughout his years as supreme leader of the Third Reich. But archivists have found pictures of him in the army. And his mustache at that point was jet black and what we call a handlebar mustache, which was quite a popular style at that time.

  After his rise to power, some of Adolf Hitler’s enemies accused him of having been a coward in combat. The evidence suggests just the opposite. After the first battle of Ypres, he was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, for bravery. Just three months before the end of the war, he was given the Iron Cross, First Class, a decoration that was rarely given to a common soldier in the old Imperial Army. A member of his unit later said this was awarded after he singlehandedly captured fifteen enemy soldiers (see Third Reich, 29–30).