A danse macabre in the African desert
Shadows
It is the third day. Today, I am assigned to the western, or forward, antiaircraft battery. Hans has the eastern gun. Almost every third day the British have sent a reconnaissance plane toward us: our lives have become patterned around that fact. But we look ready each day.
At least, we are told it is a recon plane. Before he died, Herr Dietrich told us, "If it is a recon plane, we must do our best to knock them out of the skies. Our appearance of bloodthirsty determination will help the Britishers' report of us." So we wait.
The land here is mostly flat, unlike the steep hills and valleys of home, and it is also dead, unlike home when I was last there. I do not like to think of the green and slate colors all black, burnt and scarred by the Allied bombs. When the sun rises here, it sends the light running ahead of it, like pouring golden water on a dark tabletop. The nights are cold, the sunrise cool, and the largest part of the day is hot.
I wear an old Luftwaffe jacket, gloves on my hands as I sit at the controls. The leather jacket has ragged holes down one side. Within hours of the sun's rise, I'll be stripped to my undershirt.
Stretching night-stiffened limbs, I catch my leg against the metal frame. It is only a glancing blow, but the pain flies up through me like the red streaks radiating from my wound.
"Scheisse!" I mutter.
Gingerly, I move my leg aside. The seat of the gun is rough, better used on a farm tractor than for a weapon. Even so, to recline invites sleep. Instead, I look back over my shoulder at the camp.
The 10 or more cooking fires are lit, and Johann's most important duty for the day has been performed. Prometheus--I call him that for the fire he brings to the British--huddles inside what would be the kitchen tent. He is wearing his cook's uniform, easily seen from the air. He waits, as we all do, for the sound of the aeroplane. The serving tables are set; the containers half full of something like food. The wind shifts the smaller pots a bit. The occasional tinny clank carries across the empty field between us.
The massed trucks, the personnel carriers. All of this is for them alone. The tents, the fires, even the camouflage thrown over our weapon emplacements. It is for them.
I can hear it. Almost all of the noise from the engine, I was told, so little from the propeller. Sound travels as quickly as dawn sunlight in the desert, but deceives about the direction.
There it is...too distant to make out the details. But even were I to see them, I would not be able to correctly identify the craft. The type has ceased to be important. Only the circle within a circle of the British emblem interests me. It is a good target at which to aim.
High and fast it comes, staying hidden in the sky-filling explosion of the morning sun. The flight goes as others before it; we fire, the plane circles, we fire again, the sentries on the ground move about, and the English fly away with their photographs.
*
Within the consuming, jolting reports of the weapon I control, I wonder about them. About those men who fly over us. Do they see through this? Do they see through us?
Surely they've not pierced the veil of deception we've thrown around our camp, as surely as the camouflage is wrapped about the guns. For if they had, they'd not return again and again with their cameras.
I've never been in an aeroplane. I was shipped to Afrika in the stinking hold of a coal steamer. I wish I were not hurling steel at them. I wish I could be in the cool heights with them, racing faster than the swiftest bird can fly. But I'd not be looking down. I'd be looking ahead, to where the sky and the land touch.
When the British look down, do they see us as men, or as small running figures? Perhaps the pilots do not even observe us. As I understand it, there are automatic cameras in the nose of some craft. But if he can see us, this British pilot, does he think of us as deadly implacable enemies, or mere grains upon the grains of his film? I would rather be seen as his foe than not be seen at all.
*
After the plane flees back across the desert, all stretch and warm themselves in the same sun we'll be cursing in short hours.
Hans has made our breakfast. It is mostly tasteless but filling stuff. Hans prefers to have the breakfast duty after he has been at the guns. We are unable to hear for some time after, the reports deafen us so. Thus, when the rote complaints come, Hans merely smiles and turns away.
Rudolph waves his good arm in front of my bowl to capture my attention. "Ja?" I say, my voice loud inside my head.
His lips move, but I do not need my ears to know what he says. He is reminding me that the trucks must be moved.
"Johann?" I call. He comes to me without question. We are the least halt of our company. We finish our meal and leave the cook's tent.
"Fortunate," I hear Johann say faintly. He points. "...grade..."
"Ja." It will be easier to roll them down to a more level area, even though the rubber of the tires is flaking and flat.
With much pushing and cursing, we change the position of the trucks, using only our backs and what strength God has left us. It conserves the small quantity of diesel fuel remaining.
We are spent by midmorning. The camp has changed in small ways. The trucks have been moved, one or two tents have shifted their location, and a new machine gun nest appears to have been placed.
Cooled, and at the same time plagued by our drying sweat, Johann and I return to our tent. Rudolph and the others are tramping wearily about the camp, from tent to tent, around the perimeter, across the small field. They leave long footprints in the dusty earth. I wave them off as I see them. Gratefully, they break off and sit in the slight shade of the empty officer's hut. Their breathing is harsh. It whistles out of their parched mouths like the wind between old trees.
*
I am the surgeon by default. My skills are more those of a medieval barber.
The men come to me slowly, quietly. It is a kindness for them to do that. I can sit in my camp chair and wait for them to make their painful way to my tent. Most cannot walk as easily as I. Perhaps it is more pride than kindness that drives them. Or fear.
"We will change the dressing now, Johann." I no longer ask when it is a matter of their healing.
He stiffens. He lost an eye and part of a hand when his cannon blew apart beneath him during engagements with the Americans. He does not like for anyone to see the moist socket, the puckered flesh about his face. The bandage is an evil yellow color, soaked with the weeping of his burnt flesh and crusted with desert sand.
He asks, "Is there any news from the front?"
They will all ask it, in their fashion. I peel the stiff bandage from his face carefully. "There is no news from any front. You would have seen it coming...probably on a motorcycle dispatch."
"Have they forsaken us?" he asks quietly.
It is my own fear given voice. "No," I assure him as I gently wipe his wounded face.
"Without news, how do we know?"
I wrap his face. "It is a measure of our success that the British continue to come." I tap his shoulder. "Now go. Try not to move about when the winds blow."
"When do they not?" he replies.
Many remain wounded; moving to me as best they can. Others are healed, however imperfectly and incompletely.
As I wait for the next man, my hands droop between my bent knees. What would be complete success, I ask myself, not for the first time. As before, the answer is: To have them attack us with all their might. One hundred and twenty-five kilometers is not far, by aeroplane. If a large-scale bombing raid were staged, we could perhaps shoot down one or two of their craft. Their supply needs are much the same as ours; so too the difficulty. Any effort they expend against us weakens their position by that much. It will aid Germany's defense. It might kill us, though.
But they have not attacked. Perhaps we look as unimportant as we are.
*
Rudolph tells me that some scavenging animal has uncovered the grave of Herr Dietrich. I choose to siphon a bit of diesel fuel and burn the body. I would sooner use the fuel than assign to my weakened men the grisly task of gathering his remains together and reburying them under rock fragments. It would not only be an unsettling reminder to all, for Herr Dietrich died of his infected wounds, but unsanitary as well.
*
They came two days early. And not in the morning.
The camp was ready for them. The camp exists to be ready for them. But we were not.
Lying under canvas awnings, seeking some relief from the sun and the heat, we heard the plane. For the time of a heartbeat we were motionless, heads lifted in alarm. I have seen deer do that when surprised in a forest. They stand poised until an invisible signal is given, then leap away.
I cried, "To your posts of the morning!" We scattered stupidly like crippled hares. I limped for the nearest cannon. The plane was over us just as I reached it. Behind me, I saw men leaning on one another, hobbling about as they strove to give some appearance of function and order.
The aeroplane came in low, so low we might have fired on the pilot with pistols, had we any. For one moment, I could see the man inside.
He was looking about the camp as he flew. In a smear of silver and green he passed over me and out of the camp. I fought the urge to send a futile shot after him, and painfully walked back to the center of the camp where I found that several of the men had opened their wounds during our hasty assembly.
The English know, I think as I watch my men gather slowly. In my heart, I am fearful of their return. I keep the weapons manned while I tend to the open and bleeding flesh.
Rudolph, my senior in years but not in military duty, gives me a reassuring clasp. "They caught us once, and you don't want them to catch us again."
I smile and nod without replying.
As evening falls, a wind begins to blow, and I take the stronger men with me to re-stake the tents.
The wind grows in force, requiring every man to tie down the tanks. Had we not, they would have been scattered across the desert in canvas and plywood scraps.
It was hoped our camp would intrigue the Englishmen for a week or two. The magician's illusion. We are the misdirection to catch their eye and divert their attention from other areas. We have been performing like this for two months. Perhaps they tire of their entertainment.
Herr Dietrich must return. No, he is dead. Someone must come soon. The infection in my leg is spreading. Hans will assist me when I lance the wound, but we cannot play at war for much longer.
The sand piles against the sides of the empty tents, the heat dries and splinters the wooden barrels of what should look like assault tanks from the air. Almost daily the thin sides of the mock buildings are stove in by the scouring wind. Our food, our water, they diminish.
Dietrich must return soon. He must relieve us from this charade. Is a slow death for the Reich more glorious than a swift, bloody one? I think not.
*
It is the next day. The third day. Dawn. Although it is cold this morning, I sweat as I huddle inside my robbed-of-the-grave leather jacket. The infection has me fevered. Soon, too soon, I'll be lying on a litter with those others too ill to move. Tossing and writhing in fever dreams, until I'm too weak to do even that. And then, I'll die.
I hear him coming for a long time. The sound pushes through the sweat beading on my ears and into my head. For so long I hear the sound without knowing it as anything more than the noise of the sickness rushing through my mind.
After a time, I lift my head to a breeze. I see the aeroplane.
It is moving slowly, or is it my seeing of it that is slow? It is not flying, it is crawling across the sky like an insect on blue glass.
The desert poisons in my blood are causing me to see it. I lean forward and rest my head against the cool abraded metal of the gun mount. I close my eyes.
The noise, the rushing, is louder now, so loud as to hurt my ears. Panting, I open my eyes. I'm suddenly thirsty. If I walk very carefully, I tell myself, I will be able to reach Prometheus. He will take the fire away from me. Johann will give me water.
For a moment, I see the aeroplane directly overhead. It fills my vision, appears almost as the angel must have to the shepherds on the hill. So close, so slow I can see the streaks of oil along the fuselage, the pocks and dents on its undercarriage. It flies past me and something drops from beneath the plane. Tumbling over and over in a flat arc, its oblong shape is one I've seen before.
The bomb lands squarely among the plywood tanks with a crashing sound. Inertia spins the bomb through three or four of the tanks, and they fold in on themselves.
No explosion. It must be a malfunction.
It comes to me. Bomb! I raise my arms to the controls. My hands react as if they were on another body, in another land.
The plane circles the camp slowly and the next bomb lands among the armored vehicles. It strikes the rusted hood of a truck, and flipping off it like a hooked fish, crashes against the side of the next derelict.
Another bad bomb? I look across the camp. Most of the men are hiding, lying behind what cover the terrain will afford. Hans is at the other cannon emplacement. Doesn't the Britisher know we have these guns? Or does he think them artifice like the rest of the camp?
He is circling slowly, as if in a market seeking the choicest fruit. He selects the mess tent. The missile crashes through it and skids across the sand to within a few meters of the terrified Johann.
A new sound takes my attention. Hans has begun firing at the attacker. He is firing too quickly, the recoil of one shot ruining the aim of the next. I would call to him to conserve his shells, for we have so few, but it would be as futile as screaming into the teeth of a storm.
Johann crawls carefully toward the inert bomb. He looks at its nose, and then touches it, an act that in my fever I cannot understand.
He is saying something, Johann is. He has wrenched something from the side of the bomb and is waving it, but I cannot hear him over Hans' firing.
The pilot seems to disregard Hans. He detaches another bomb, and our painfully maintained officer's quarters crumple like silk in a flame.
Suddenly it seems Hans' best is almost good enough. I see the entire plane shudder sideways in the air. Shocked by his fortuitous shot, Hans ceases to fire.
In the silence that follows, there are three sounds I can faintly hear: the roaring in my ears, the shrill whine of the aeroplane engine, and Johann's shouts, nearly choked by laughter.
"Holz!" he is crying. "Holz!"
The craft jettisons the rest of its load. The bombs spill out onto the dusty ground and I reflexively cower behind the gun.
I'm hearing more laughter. Others have taken up Johann's cry. "Holz! Gott in Himmel, Holz!"
The plane is flying toward me. It resembles a living thing to me...I've seen ducks shot out of the sky. They would tumble and fall, stunned. If not too terribly wounded, they would painfully spread their wings and try to glide to safety. The experienced hunter would continue to sight a falling bird, rifle ready to fire again if the prey recovered.
He's not out of my range. Flying slow at the first, he is now barely aloft.
Wood.
Johann says wood.
The bombs did not explode because they were wood.
The mock bombs lie strewn about the camp as if left by a careless child. They are toys, like the rifles of boys at play.
It's too fast. He is going to pass right over me; he begins to come directly within my sights, within my range.
I claw myself out of the gunseat and fall heavily to the sand. The webs of sweat about my face become cold and dry in the breeze.
He has destroyed our masque of a camp with his simulacra of destruction. His bullets will shred my body to rags.
I am framed inside his gunsights.
I can feel the weight of the barrel as it aligns with me.
He will fire his wing guns.
He will not.
Kneeling, one of my hands ascends shakily as the plane drifts a stone's throw overhead, spilling fluid and smoke from its wounds.
For just the barest moment, I can see the sun-wrinkled face of the British pilot, and he mine.
No more lies. No more shadow of threat, no need to play at living when we are slowly dying. He gave us lie for lie. He gives me now life for life.
The plane is beyond me. One wing laboriously dips toward the earth and slowly rises level again.
And then he is gone.
*
Roy M. "Griff" Griffis has written short stories, plays, poetry, novels, and screenplays. He is a member of the Writer's Guild and a former US Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer. His novel The Big Bang: Volume One of Lonesome George Chronicles will be published in Spring 2014 by Liberty Island Media. The second volume of the By the Hands of Men series, entitled Into the Flames, will be released in early 2014. He lives in Southern California with his family, where he is at work on the second book of the Lonesome George series.
Roy "Griff" Griffis has been a waiter, a janitor, a book salesman and a USCG Rescue Swimmer, finding this last occupation most similar to being a writer: "At the end of the day, it all comes down to what you, and you alone, do."
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Review by ffleming
Mar 9 2014
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Compelling and Tense
I had heard the story of the wooden bombs before and thought it rather humorous... not so much now.