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Broken Jewel The Betrayal Game The Assassins Gallery Liberation Road Last Citadel Scorched
Earth The End of War War of the Rats Souls to Keep |
"Brilliant storytelling by an author
who continues to grow and impress, and who, here, seems in complete
control of his material." David L. Robbins's The End of War CHAPTER ONE December 31, 1944, 11:50 p.m. He lowers his gaze to the dirt floor of the barn. Several empty tobacco baskets lie about, waiting for another moist day to put the tobacco in case, that condition where the humidity is high to make the leaves supple enough to be handled. But this has been a dry winter, and the burley tobacco, though sufficiently air-cured now dangling on their sticks overhead, can't be touched without breaking the leaves like ancient parchment. This Christmas came and went with little gift money. The family is edgy, waiting for the weather to cooperate and put the tobacco in case long enough to bundle it into hands, arrange the hands into the big woven baskets, then truck it all to the auction hall down in Marshall. The family needs to make some money, get school clothes, fix some machinery, buy next season's seed. Only a third of the leaves have been stripped and separated. The lowest leaves, called 'lugs,' and the paltry tips at the top all get tossed on a pile outside the barn to be used as ground cover and fertilizer. The broad middle leaves, the 'smokers,' get sold for bulk tobacco. The best leaves make it as far as cigar wrappers. A good, heavy harvest of smokers pays some bills. Inside the house Bandy has a mom and dad, a wife, a sister and brother-in-law, a dozen or so uncles and aunts and cousins and their kin, waiting for 1945 to arrive in another ten minutes. Everyone of them lives nearby, a dog wouldn't get tired jogging between all their houses, either in Big Laurel, Little Laurel, Shelton Laurel, or on a rural road associated with no town. They are tobacco farmers up here in the Appalachian hollers. The clefts between the high slopes are narrow, and arable land comes only in slim patches, always beside the roads. Nothing makes a buck better on so little land as tobacco. The Bandys, the Ketchums, the Wallins, are woven together by marriage and births like the tobacco baskets, broad and firm and white, hundred-year old clans of soil and nicotine, pocket knives and Saturday nights at the Masonic dance hall. The clamor of his family's revelry—generational, those kids still awake squeal, the adults clink glasses and toast what they're going to do next year, the old folks cackle, the oldest ones cough—skim like sounds over a lake, tinkling and clear to Charles Bandy through the crisp, frostless mountain night. The mountain doesn't know it's New Year's Eve. The war doesn't know it's New Year's Eve. Bandy opens his palms to the kerosene lantern he brought to the barn. He washes his hands in the little heat above the vent and thinks of the G.I.s freezing right now in foxholes and slit trenches in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Germany. Pall Mall and Lucky Strikes are dangling from beard shrouded soldiers' lips right now. Surely some Tennessee tobacco is glowing over there. The barn door slides open. Leaves in the rafters rustle their wrinkles; the barn takes on the feel of a cave coated in restless bats. This eerie sense disappears in just a moment, because it is her and no room she enters is a cave. She shuts the door. She has another lantern with her. "Charley. Hey." "Hey." "What're you doing out here? Everyone's inside. It's almost time." Bandy hears the piney woods in his wife's voice. Her accent is sugary, with rounded corners, not the serrated Appalachian tongue, not the mountain laurel. She comes from the flatlands, from Hendersonville, North Carolina. Her people farm tobacco down there, too. Not the burley but flue cured, where they keep a fire stoked in the barns day and night. They've got big plots of land, not the sloped slivers Bandy's tribe makes pay. The two met at Vanderbilt when they were both twenty-one. She got her teaching degree, he graduated in journalism. They married and stayed in Nashville five more years. She taught third grade, he took photos for any rag that would buy him. Then eleven years ago he carried her up here to the mountains and everyone, kids, parents, family, farmers, fell over themselves for her. She could be mayor if there was a mayor; they have a Postmaster and a Sheriff, that's the extent of the government in these hills. "You alright?" she asks. "I'm fine, Vic." "Well, come inside. Everyone's missing you. Your mama asked me to come get you." "I'll be along directly." "Charley, I'm not going to celebrate the New Year with you out here in the barn. I have spent enough time without you already." He thinks Victoria is referring to their war-time, years gouged out of the last decade, years of fear for her, and that she wants to make him sorry for it right now, again. But she steps up close and says something different, sweetly. "You have been working way too hard since you got back. Your daddy's roof. Alvin's fence. Jane and Edgar's tractor. What about our house?" She sets the lantern on the dirt floor. She slips her arms around his waist. "What about me?" Bandy takes in her brown hair nestled under his nose. She's only five feet five, he's a good six footer. She's got that teacher scent, squeaky clean, a role model for the kids, for sixteen years of marriage now. She's still cute, the cheerleader she used to be in college keeps dancing and doing splits in her eyes and smiles. Except for the difference in height, they look very much alike. Both have mousy hair, both are lean faced with brown eyes that wince like a kitten's when listening, Bandy and his wife have small feet and hands and narrow shoulders. Perhaps that's why they took to each other with such speed when they met sixteen years ago, they recognized they were cut from the same tobacco-stained cloth. Bandy breathes her in. For a moment he can't smell the leaves in their firmament, or the war in its new year. "Victoria?" "Yes, doll?" "I love you." His wife squeezes him. She is happy right now, and that makes this the moment to tell her, because he must yank the happiness away from her. It's the only fair way to do it. "I'm going back." She does not release him, nor even flinch. Her head rests on his chest, her ear gentle against his heart. This saddens him, because she knew it was coming. He hadn't ever fooled her, hadn't once in the two weeks he'd been home given her a single moment to believe he might stay. "Haven't they gotten enough out of you?" The 'they' is LIFE Magazine, Bandy's employer for the past eight years, since the magazine's inception in 1936. He is a staff photographer. His name is known nationwide for his byline, Charles Bandy, LIFE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, for the remarkable black and white images he has captured of war and warriors, of both friend and foe. His exposed negatives go via military courier from the battlefield to London censors, then by wire to New York, then onto the glossy pages of LIFE. Just days after the pictures are taken, the hopeful and weary eyes of the home front stare into the magazine as though into a crystal ball, for it is there that they witness their sons and fathers and enemies far across the ocean, they peer through haze and exploding earth and risk. America wonders and weeps through Bandy's camera. Bandy makes no reply to his wife's charge. She has not lessened her grip about his waist. Nor has she taken her ear from his chest, as though to make certain that he indeed has a heart, to be leaving her again. She speaks into the wool of his sweater. There is no sadness in her voice. She is not appealing to him, not beseeching, but prosecuting a point. She thinks he is wrong to go back and will try to prove it. "1936, the Spanish Civil War. 1937, the Sino-Japanese War. 1940, the Battle of Britain. 1941, Manilla, Tobruk. 1942, Libya and Egypt. Guadalcanal." Victoria now lifts her head from his breast. She sniffles. She has lost the struggle to stay calm in the list of his assignments and the misery of his absences. She grabs at his green eyes with hers, which are unblinking and damp. The yellow lantern light creates small suns in the wet trails down her cheeks. "1943, Sicily, Messina, Salerno, Naples. 1944, D-Day, for God's sake, you were in the first wave. Normandy. Holland. Belgium." Bandy weakly smiles down at her. "You've been following my career." She is not amused and answers in a quiet voice. "I've been praying for your life, Charley." Inside the house, only a hundred feet away, someone calls out, "Alright, y'all! One minute! One minute!" Someone else squawks a noisemaker and a child shouts, "Not yet!" At this Victoria releases her arms from around him and steps back. "I want children. Your children. I'm not getting any younger. You get killed, what am I going to do? You think about that?" "Always." "And? It doesn't seem to make you want to stay home." But this time he had come home really wanting to stay. Two weeks ago the Germans were beaten. France had been liberated. Italy switched sides. The Russians were gathering along the Vistula River in eastern Poland for their final thrust to Berlin. Wehrmacht soldiers were surrendering by the tens of thousands to Eisenhower's and Montgomery's troops. The war was expected to end by Christmas, January at the latest. Odds were that Hitler would sue for peace once the end was in sight. So Bandy figured that was it. He notified the magazine, said his goodbyes to those men and officers around him—the soldiers always changed; the instinct of the war photographer to sense where the action will happen next is his greatest asset, more vital than any facility with a camera, because a bad shot of action is better than a great shot of nothing—and he boarded a plane west. He traveled for three days to get home. Then the morning he arrived, December 16, even while he set down his duffle and held his wife, the Germans launched a massive winter counter-offensive, with 250,000 men, thousands of tanks and artillery pieces. The assault was staged opposed to all logic. It was a last roll of the dice against the Americans and British forces in Belgium and Luxembourg, launched through the thick Ardennes forests, the biggest battle yet on the Western Front. Hitler attempted to drive a wedge into the Allied forces, recapture the port of Antwerp and reclaim the initiative. In the first few days, he succeeded, stabbing west to a point just shy of the Meuse River on the French border, forging a pocket which became the name of the battle, the Bulge. Eisenhower responded to the German attack by mobilizing 600,000 men. The American airborne commander of the surrounded town of Bastogne, when asked to surrender, replied to the Germans, "Nuts." The Battle of the Bulge will be won in the next few weeks, Hitler turned back. But the war has been prolonged by who knows how long. Now it looks like it won't end until somebody—either the Reds or the western Allies—assaults and takes Berlin. Hitler has screwed Bandy's plans. Bandy says, "I'll be back." Victoria takes this like a slap. She even starts to bring up her hands to fend off the words. She bites her lip and turns away. "In a box, Charley?" Inside the house, Bandy's dad calls out, "Alright! Here comes 1945, the best damn year of 'em all! Right?" Answering shouts agree, the best damn year of 'em all. The family counts down from ten, nine, eight, seven.... Noisemakers start to blow seconds early. Someone hollers, Where's Charley? Bandy stands four feet from his wife. One of her tears dots the dirt floor, and they stand apart, separated by an ocean.
January 1, 1945, midnight All the bells are ringing. Even this far outside Moscow, twenty kilometers, the Marshal can hear them. He leans his nose close to a chilly window pane. He has pushed aside the thick blackout curtain to gaze into a moonless, overcast dark. The glow of Moscow is missing from the horizon, shrouded for safety sake. All the other structures nearby in his compound are likewise extinguished. The night has total victory outside save for the lanterns of his security guards strolling the crunchy ground around the dacha. The distant din of the bells is incongruous, joy and hope playing against such blackness. This is the Russian way, he thinks. Beauty meshed in tragedy, never one without the other for us. Along the same wall where the Marshal stands one of his generals thrusts aside the curtain of another window. This general turns to the others in the giant banquet room—Politburo members, military men and their wives, all pomaded and powdered, brass and lace. The general calls out to them, "Hear the bells!" The Marshal does not swivel around but keeps his back to their cheers for the new year, the kisses of men given first to their comrades on both cheeks, then to the women on lips, the bear hugs and handshakes. He turns only to the general near him looking out into the same inky Russia. He says, "Close the curtain, comrade general." The general hesitates only for a moment, in surprise. He lets go the curtain and it falls into place. "Yes, comrade Stalin," he says, inclining his forehead. "My apologies, comrade." The general makes his escape back to the arms of his fellows and women. Stalin continues to stare through the glass at nothing. He looks west, towards Poland. There he has his two generals Zhukov and Koniev, his two studded fists, poised on the Vistula with a million men and ten thousand artillery pieces and twenty thousand tanks. Before the month is out, he will brandish those fists and pound the Germans first out of Poland, then into pulp in their own homeland. He will not unfurl those fists, will not wipe the blood off them, until he wipes them on Hitler's shirt in Berlin. That's the lair of the beast. That's the trophy the world wants. Whoever captures Berlin wins the war. The English and the Americans long for the prestige of it. They've turned back a nasty winter offensive from Hitler. Their noses have been bloodied one more time. Plus, Hitler has stepped up his V-1 and V-2 rocket bombings of London. All this will make them push back even harder, move even faster into Germany. Now they will believe even more that Berlin can be theirs. But Berlin belongs to Russia. By might. By sacrifice. He trusts none of his generals. The taking of Berlin is too vital to delegate control to anyone but himself. Stalin has taken control of the coordination of all three fronts involved in the assault on the German capital, First and Second Byelorussian and First Ukrainian. Nor does he trust that English bulldog Churchill or the cripple Roosevelt. No matter Churchill's lengthy toasts or Roosevelt's slavering courtship. They will do anything to take Berlin from Stalin. That is why anything is warranted to take it first. He holds back the curtain another minute, breaking his own hard rule, staying apart from the revelers behind him. When he hears the party fade at his back, he lets the curtain relax and turns. His boot heels clack, he comes to attention at the window. With the report all eyes are on him. Even the chattiest of them shuts up. He stands like a rock, a chipped boulder really. He knows how squat and ugly he is, with a face pockmarked by childhood smallpox, short forehead, squinty hazel eyes, only five feet four inches tall. Do any of these leaders and ladies rapt now before him know that the second and third toes on his left foot have grown together? He's a grotesque little gnome, chiseled from a poor quarry. No, he thinks, they don't anymore see Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the little Georgian bandit. They see only Stalin. Rightly so, he thinks. Rightly so. The Marshal casts his eyes over the pack, forty or so of them invited here to his dacha to celebrate the new year. They stand ramrod straight out of fear or respect, he's not concerned which. Who are these suit fillers and dress curvers? All of them, even the women, are his creations. What power they wield they possess only in his name. The shoulder boards, the stiff shirts, boots and handbags, flesh and bone would end up crackling on a bonfire with a wave of his hand and within hours some forty others would stand here gaping. Who are these newcomers to the new year of the Red victory? What have they done to stand here before Stalin and not be swept away? Nothing. There's not one left who knows Stalin as less than a god, who has any claim at all to pity should their god turn on him. Not one of them with the bells ringing far away, full glass in hand, woman in tow, eyes stuck on Stalin, would hesitate to put a knife in Stalin's back if he could get away with it. They want power. These are the ones Stalin is wary of. And the ones who do not desire power, Stalin despises. But the power is Stalin's alone, his right. None of these celebrants were there half a century ago to study with the boy Iosif, the seminary student of ten years. Who among them ran and hid with Koba, the revolutionary with a nickname taken from the hero in a Georgian novel, a wanted man by nineteen who led an armed robbery in 1907 against a Cossack patrol escorting a money shipment and got away with 300,000 rubles for the Bolsheviks? Or shivered in exile with the hard young Stalin who never once left Russia, while others waited in Paris for the revolt to begin in St. Petersburg? Or as a political prisoner who made five escapes? Which of them sat at the right hand of Lenin himself, or battled the Whites at Tsaritsyn so fiercely that the city was named after him, Stalingrad? What man alive has branded his own name on the revolution more than Stalin? These frippish fools know only Stalin, 'man of steel.' They knew Lenin, but did they know the young fire-breather Vladimir Ulyanov, who took his nomme de guerre from the river Lena in Siberia where he was exiled? And you can bet they remember that bastard Trotsky, but do they recall him when he was that bastard Leon Bronshtein, the wire-haired Jew who adopted the name of one of his jailers? Today Trotsky lives abroad, fearing for his life. And that loudmouth Lev Rozenfeld, who would have us call him Kamenev, 'man of stone,' who in 1926 would challenge Stalin in Lenin's name. Where is he now? Under a granite marker where Stalin put him ten years later, after arrest and a very public trial and an admission of guilt. Stalin killed a few other birds with the stone Kamenev, flung him to fell Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky and the rest who would deny Russia the leadership of Stalin. Those men knew both Lenin and Stalin in the early days. They too were co-authors of the Bolshevik uprising. They held power of their own making. But they spoke of things regarding Stalin which history has proven to be lies. They dared consider that they and not Stalin might be the true interpreters of Lenin, that they were the brightest lamps for Russia's path. History has proven them wrong. Look around now. They are gone, all of them, with their families and everything they touched. Steel proved stronger than the river, the stone, the prison-keeper. History is Stalin's courtyard while their names are dust on the bricks. How many? Dozens, hundreds, thousands, Stalin does not keep tabs like some Arbat merchant of the goods that have gone through his hands, no one calls Stalin to account. He notes the Moscow bells have stopped. He does not know how long he has stood like this, rigid, staring over the crowd's head, hating ghosts in the air. A minute, perhaps a second. When did the bells stop? It seems to him that even time does his bidding. He relaxes his eyes, widening the sockets. He takes a breath and runs two fingers over his moustache. The young ambassador to the United States, Andrei Gromyko, lifts his glass. "Comrade Marshal," he says. "It would be an honor to have you make the first toast to the new year." Stalin thinks he will do so and that he will watch a bit more closely this upstart politico who lifts his glass first. Stalin steps forward from the window. "Bring me a glass." When his hand is full, he raises the drink in toast. Stalin is a tee-totaller. But for the beginning of this year of victory, he will drink vodka. His hand in the air is still below the chins of many in the room. The rest of the glasses go up and just for a flash Stalin fights his claustrophobia; his eyes are so far below all the crystal hoisted and packed above his head, he senses he is beneath a shining and crowding weight, like the surface of a sunlit lake. He takes a step backward. This relieves him; he speaks. "In a matter of days, the mighty Red forces gathered on the Vistula River will strike the first blow towards the heart of the German beast. In 1945 we will put an end to this senseless and horrible war to defeat fascism. In the years we have fought the Hitlerites, we have lost over twenty-five million soldiers and civilians. That is more than ten Russians for every meter of land between Moscow and Berlin." Stalin watches the faces grow somber. A few of the glasses waiver in the air. He lets the moment hang; some boots shuffle. He has invited the millions of war ghosts into the room where everyone can see them. These legions of Russian dead join the spirits which only he sees, overwhelming them into anonymity. Now Stalin feels comfortable. "There is not a single Soviet citizen who has gone untouched by this war. Every man and woman in the ranks, every factory worker, every farmer, has a score to settle. Our soldiers will fight from what they have suffered. They will fight from what they have witnessed and from what they have lost. Atrocities scar every village and city the Germans have touched. Have no fear that we are about to win. Have no fear of Hitler. I give you my word we will wipe our asses in Berlin soon in the new year." Men in the crowd smile at Stalin's coarseness. The women titter behind gloved hands. "To the victorious Red Army! Za zdrovya!" Glasses are turned bottoms to the ceiling, all of them. Stalin watches elbows and swallows and satisfied gasps. When they are done, his own glass still full, he makes a private toast. I will take Berlin. The cost is of no concern. Whatever it is, we've already paid most of it. He drinks. The gathering applauds. "Budenny!" Stalin yawps. "Did you bring your damned accordion?" A spry old marshal of the Red Army puts up his hands. "Yes, comrade Stalin, of course. You know I can't come to a party without it. I always get sent home to bring it back." "Then play us a polka. Let's dance to some German music!" The military man hurries to a corner and returns, strapping on his weathered accordion. He stamps his boot four times to set the tempo and launches into a rousing Prussian tune. Couples set down their glasses and partner up. In moments the room is swirling, stamping with gaiety. Budenny, the former cavalry officer, is quite the catalyst. Stalin sidles out of the way. The accordion renders waltzes, folks songs, ballads. Stalin fetches his English Dunhill pipe from his place at the head table. From a pouch he pours another bowlful of shredded Herzegovina Flor cigarettes and lights up. He paces the room through clouds of blue smoke, enjoying the dancers, savoring his pipe and his separateness. He has reduced his need for human relationships to almost nothing. He has seen two wives die: first, beloved Kato in their youth, from disease. Then the traitorous Nadezhda who committed suicide in 1932 after arguing with him over politics. Yakov, son of his first marriage, an artillery commander who surrendered to the Germans—a coward, only cowards surrender. Vasili, a sniveler. Daughter Svetlana, acid-tongued like her mother, estranged. Stalin, the vozd, the supremo, cannot afford the normal human luxuries of emotion or values. He must have steel cords where others have nerves. How can he dote on one, or two, or twenty, when he must envision and guard the future for hundreds of millions? He cannot want for himself when an entire nation is told everyday, 'Stalin is thinking of us.' He wonders, what could be lonelier? Stalin watches his guests grow drunker with the dancing. Marshal Budenny has made himself quite popular tonight. "Semyon," he calls to the musical marshal. "Rest your hands for a moment. I want to see your feet in action." Budenny halts his playing. Sweat breaks on his brow from an hour of the accordion's buttons and keys. The dancers freeze like figurines. Stalin walks to the gramophone. No one else in the room moves. He picks out a disk and slides it beneath the needle. The dancers lower their arms, no longer porcelain dolls but uneasy humans. Out of the gramophone bell emerges a scratchy ditty, a balalaika plucks a fast-paced folk melody along with a clarinet, drums and a wailing violin. Stalin approaches Budenny. He puts his arms out to relieve the old man of the accordion. "Dance for me, Semyon. The Gopak. I have seen you do it, you're magnificent." "Comrade," the marshal raises his palms in defense, "not in many years." Stalin sets the accordion on the ground. "And many years from now, you will say that you did it tonight. Dance, Semyon. To victory." Stalin steps back. He claps his hands to the music. The crowd joins him now and they form a rousing circle around Semyon Budenny, a seventy-three year old Marshal of the Red Army. The gray warrior squats on his haunches, crosses his arms and kicks out his heels in the classic Cossack dance. Budenny dances with fervor. He begins rickety but soon limbers and is impressive for his age. The others shout "Urrah!" and clap in time to the music. Stalin studies Budenny's face. The dancing marshal keeps a pleasant smile. Stalin knows that Budenny is in great pain. Click here to read a summary. |
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