Prisoners of War Read online

  For my grandparents

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: No Snow in the Desert

  Chapter 2: Red Snow

  Chapter 3: Devil Dog

  Chapter 4: Allies

  Chapter 5: A Boy and His Dog

  Chapter 6: Wildhund

  Chapter 7: A Town in Morning

  Chapter 8: The Barn

  Chapter 9: The Least Resistance

  Chapter 10: Toppled Snowmen

  Chapter 11: World Series Winners

  Chapter 12: Our Trespasses

  Chapter 13: A Bone to Pick

  Chapter 14: Look to the Sky

  Chapter 15: Like Riding a Bike

  Chapter 16: Dog Training

  Chapter 17: Jabo!

  Chapter 18: Boots

  Chapter 19: Fighting Like Dogs

  Chapter 20: Body and Soul

  Chapter 21: Counting

  Preview

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by C. Alexander London

  Copyright

  “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war …”

  — Mark Antony in Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

  “You can read every day where a dog saved the life of a drowning child, or lay down his life for his master. Some people call this loyalty. I don’t. I may be wrong, but I call it love — the deepest kind of love.”

  — Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows

  “Hey, Rivera,” Goldsmith whispered in my ear. His breath frosted the air between us. “Looks like some kind of fairy tale out there in the woods, don’t it?”

  Crunchy snow clung to the tree trunks like white fur. I pressed my fingers against the ground in front of me and the snow crackled. I stood up to my shoulders in the icy foxhole. Goldsmith stood beside me, shivering and talking too much.

  “I feel like Little Red Riding Hood’s gonna come through the forest any second.” He laughed. “Off to grandmother’s house she goes. Except, she ain’t finding no grandmother out here. Just us, the GIs of the Ninety-Ninth Infantry!” He slapped the snow in front of him and laughed again.

  I grunted. I didn’t think we were supposed to be talking. We were supposed to be watching the forest for Krauts — I mean Germans, German soldiers, Hitler’s army. Everyone said the Germans were as beaten as the St. Louis Browns in the World Series, that the war in Europe was about over. Everyone said we’d be home by Christmas.

  I didn’t want to be home by Christmas. I had just gotten here and I wanted to fight the Nazis, not sit in a frozen foxhole with some guy jabbering in my ear all morning. I kept my eyes fixed on the woods in front of me. The snow wasn’t so thick. I could see branches and a few scraggly bushes poking up from the ground, covered in frost, like icing on a cake.

  I doubted I’d see anything more exciting than that. They sent the new guys, replacement soldiers like me, out here to the Ardennes forest in Belgium precisely because it had been so quiet. There was little risk that my lack of experience would mess anything up or get anyone killed here.

  I couldn’t feel my feet in my boots anymore. I hoped they were still there below me. I kicked them against the frozen dirt just to be sure. They stung.

  “Hey, Rivera,” Goldsmith pressed me. “You hearing me? Do you speak English, even? Huh? You habla inglés?”

  I rolled my eyes and tried to ignore him.

  Goldsmith’s rifle lay between us, propped up against the edge of the foxhole, next to my medic’s bag. I knew that if he had to use his rifle, I’d probably have to use my medic’s bag. I’d had just a few weeks of first-aid training before the Ninety-Ninth Infantry called me up and dropped me down here on the front lines as a replacement soldier the previous night. I didn’t even know what unit I was in. A sergeant had simply put me in this foxhole next to Goldsmith in the pitch black and told us to look out for Germans.

  “What we do if they show up, Sarge?” Goldsmith had asked.

  “Shoot them,” the sergeant grumbled, and stalked away into the cold night.

  Goldsmith probably knew as much about fighting the Nazis as I knew about being a medic in a war, but we were stuck together in the foxhole all night, so we both did our jobs and looked out for Germans. I kind of wished I had a rifle instead of a bunch of bandages and a big red cross on my arm.

  In boot camp, all the guys had made fun of me for training to be a medic instead of a rifleman, but it wasn’t my fault. I wanted to fight Nazis. That’s why I joined the army in the first place, to show that I was a fighter, that I could be heroic, but the army didn’t ask what I wanted when they gave me my assignment.

  I scanned the dim forest, shivering through my thin coat, but I didn’t see anything to make me worry. Somewhere in the night a heavy artillery barrage cut loose. A lot of firepower. The ground vibrated beneath us, even though the attack was miles away.

  I figured it was our guys, way down the front line — but how far, I couldn’t tell. I figured I wouldn’t want to be the Germans fielding those incoming shells. I almost felt bad for them. Except they were Nazis, so I figured they were getting what was coming to them.

  I hugged myself and rubbed my shoulders to keep warm. My fingers squeezed the checkerboard patch on my shoulder, the insignia of our division. The Ninety-Ninth. They called us the Battle Babies because by 1944, we still hadn’t seen real combat. There had been some fighting a few days back, while I was still in France on my way to the front. I was disappointed to miss it. It was bad enough to be in the war without a weapon, but if I never got the chance to be in a battle, how would I ever hold my head up high back home? It felt like high school baseball all over again. I rode the bench in baseball, and now I was riding the bench in the Second World War.

  “Rivera!” Goldsmith whisper-shouted at me, fed up with my silence. “I asked if you speak English.”

  “Yes!” I snapped at him. “I speak English.”

  “You ain’t said a word all night. I thought you might only speak, what? Spanish?”

  “I do speak Spanish,” I told him. “And English.”

  “You Puerto Rican?”

  “American.”

  “We’re all American … but where you from before America?”

  “I was born in America,” I told him.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “My parents are Mexican,” I told him, and looked away. I didn’t want to see his face. There’d been riots last year all over the country and a lot of people blamed the Mexicans for them. I didn’t have anything to do with that stuff, but some people still just didn’t trust anyone who spoke Spanish.

  But I was American, through and through. Why else would I be freezing my behind off in a foxhole in Europe? “I’m from Albuquerque.”

  “I’m from New York,” Goldsmith said. “We got a lot of Puerto Ricans.”

  I didn’t feel like explaining how Puerto Ricans and Mexicans were totally different, so I just shrugged.

  “My family’s from Lithuania,” he continued. “Eastern Europe, you know?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, although I wasn’t sure what the question was. Goldsmith loved to talk. I was happy to just keep quiet in the early morning light and watch the forest, but he was determined to have a conversation.

  “They got chased out for being Jews,” he said. “Their homes and businesses burned down, even their synagogue. So they came to New York. Started over. Garment business, right? I guess you figured that.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said again. What did I know about New York or Jews or the garment business? I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, played ball in high school, and signed up for the army before I even graduated. I didn’t figure anything about
anything, except that I was going to fight for my country and I was the only guy in my class going so soon. Other guys in school were bigger and stronger and tougher than me, but they all just sat around waiting for the draft, or waiting for the war to be over. Not me. I didn’t wait. I even lied about being eighteen so that I could enlist. I wouldn’t be eighteen for another two months, but with Hitler losing the fight, I didn’t think I could wait. If the war ended before I got in it, I’d never be able to show just how tough I could be.

  “You don’t say much, huh?” Goldsmith shook his head.

  “Not much to say,” I told him.

  “You got a problem with me being Jewish?”

  That took me by surprise. As far as I knew, I’d never met a Jewish guy before. Was I supposed to have a problem with him being Jewish?

  “I don’t have a problem with that,” I told him. “You got a problem with me being Mexican?”

  “You said you were American,” he smirked. That broke the tension. We both laughed a little. I guess each of us was used to people having a problem with who we were. Now that we were together in this frozen little foxhole in this frozen forest, ordered here by the Ninety-Ninth Infantry Division of the United States Army, the only people we had a problem with were the Nazis.

  And we were here to kick their butts all the way back to Berlin.

  “Check it out.” Goldsmith reached under his shirt and pulled out his dog tags hanging on a chain around his neck. Stamped into the thin metal was his name and the serial number the army had given him, and then the letter H.

  “For Hebrew,” he said. “So, you know, if something happens to me they know what kind of prayers to say and stuff.”

  I nodded. I didn’t like to think much about that kind of thing, but I knew it was there. That’s part of the medic’s job. In case a guy we were treating … well. I had a C on mine, for Catholic. If anything happened to me, they’d call a priest. I didn’t know who a Hebrew guy would want called. The woods were so quiet, I didn’t figure it would come to that.

  “When we get to Berlin, I can’t wait to show this to those Nazis.” He laughed. “The Nazis think we Jews are nothin’. They think they can just kick us around, bully us, but I’ll show ’em. They’ll know it was a Jew who beat them.”

  “I thought you said we were all American?” I cracked a smile at him.

  “I’m a New Yorker,” he said, laughing. “We’re something else all together. Nobody kicks us around. We’ll teach Hitler what’s what. You and me!”

  I nodded. We fell back into a comfortable silence, the chattering of our teeth the only sound I could hear. The sun was just starting to rise. After a few minutes, I guess the quiet got unbearable for Goldsmith, because he started up the whispering again.

  “You even know the Little Red Riding Hood story?” he asked me. “I mean, do they have fairy tales in Mexico?”

  “Albuquerque’s in New Mexico,” I said. “And yes, we have fairy tales.”

  “Your abuela tell them to you?” he smirked. Abuela. Grandmother. I guess Goldsmith knew some Spanish. “Like I said,” he explained. “We got a lot of Puerto Ricans in New York. I picked up a few things.”

  “Mi abuela me dijo un montón de cuentos,” I tried, but he just stared back at me blankly. Guess he didn’t pick up that much Spanish from his Puerto Rican friends. “Yeah,” I told him in English. “My grandmother told me a lot of stories, but they were different from Little Red Riding Hood. Old ones from the little village where she grew up.”

  “Hey, we got that in common.” Goldsmith smiled. “My grandma told me old ones too, from her little village. She only speaks Yiddish, so I never really understood much of what she said.”

  “What’s Yiddish?”

  “It’s an old Jewish language,” he said. “You never heard of Yiddish?”

  “No,” I said.

  I don’t know why, but it felt kind of good to be in this frozen little foxhole with another guy whose grandmother spoke to him in a different language. It made me feel less like I was different from all the other guys. At basic training, nobody else spoke Spanish or talked about old folk tales or missed the tamales their grandmothers made.

  The thought of fresh tamales made my mouth water. Army food wasn’t good, and out here on the front, there wasn’t much of it. I was already hungry.

  I wanted to ask Goldsmith what kinds of food his grandmother made for him, but he asked me a question first.

  “So, down in New Mexico, you got snow like this?”

  “Nothing like this,” I told him.

  “You live in, what, the desert?”

  “It’s not really the —”

  He didn’t let me finish.

  “I guess it don’t snow much in the desert,” he chuckled. “You know my people originally came from the desert. The Hebrews. Spent forty years wandering in the desert in ancient times. Must have been awful, but at least there wasn’t all this snow, right? I’m freezing my schnoz off.”

  I just wrinkled my forehead at him. I didn’t want to be rude, but I couldn’t really follow what he was talking about.

  “Schnoz means nose in Yiddish,” he said. “Like Jimmy Durante, the Great Schnozzola?”

  I shrugged. I knew Jimmy Durante was some kind of performer, but I followed baseball, not singing and dancing.

  “Oy, boychick, we gotta give you some culture.” Goldsmith shook his head and rolled his eyes at the sky.

  “What’s boychick?” I asked.

  “It’s like saying kid,” he explained.

  “Like vato in Spanish?” I asked.

  “Vato?”

  “Just, like, a guy, a pal,” I said.

  “Vaaa-to, va-to, va-va-va-vato.” Goldsmith played the word around in his mouth, stretched it, rolled it around. I guess we had something else in common aside from our grandmothers and their old stories. We both liked languages.

  “So, vato,” he asked. “You wanna learn some Yiddish?”

  The morning was pretty boring so far, so I told him sure I would. Maybe learning a few new words would pass the time. Now that we were talking, I realized it was definitely better than sitting in freezing silence, waiting for something to happen.

  “Ok, I guess yutz is as good a place as any to start,” Goldsmith said.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “A yutz is like a fool,” he explained. “Like us!” He laughed and slapped at the icy ground in front of him. “Standing in this cold foxhole all night because some generals say we got to. Or, like Hitler, thinking he can beat the whole world in a fight. He’s a yutz and a half.”

  “Yutz,” I repeated to myself. It was a fun word, felt good in the mouth, even though it was, I guess, kind of an insult.

  “So you got some more Yiddish you can teach me?” I asked. “I can’t just go around calling everyone yutz all the time. I don’t want to get —”

  “Shh!” He cut me off and grabbed his rifle. He ducked low. I ducked down beside him, so just our eyes and the barrel of his rifle poked above the top of our foxhole. We listened to the forest.

  I couldn’t hear anything at first. Then there was a loud slap, like a book dropped onto the floor in a silent study hall, and then a whistle in the sky.

  “Incoming! Take cover!” someone shouted from another foxhole down the line. I hadn’t even known there were any other foxholes up there with us. When I leaned up to try to see who had shouted, Goldsmith yanked me back down just in time for the ground in front of us to explode.

  Then another slap, a whistle, and another explosion.

  A tree above us burst into flames and smoke, branches crashed onto the crunchy snow of the forest floor. Goldsmith jumped up and raised his rifle. My ears were still ringing and I stayed at the back of the foxhole for a second, kind of in shock. If Goldsmith hadn’t pulled me down, I would have died.

  He had just saved my life.

  “Thanks!” I yelled, but he didn’t hear me over the crack of his rifle and the whistle of the artillery.


  The Germans were attacking.

  Goldsmith returned fire.

  I couldn’t even see where he was aiming. His bullets shaved the snow off the trees and splintered their bark. More bullets buzzed in our direction, like a swarm of dragonflies racing one another overhead. I felt silly just standing there beside him with nothing to do.

  Another high-pitched whistle sounded, and we both ducked down into the foxhole. I tried to imagine myself small, like a little bug curling up into my helmet, squeezing my entire body into it. Then artillery shells hit with loud explosions, one after the other.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Goldsmith and I squeezed together beneath a rain of dirt and snow. We pressed together in the tiny foxhole, side by side, hugging each other tighter than I’d ever hugged anyone in my life. My ears rang. It felt like an earthquake rumbling underneath us as the explosion rocked the ground. Smoke burned my eyes and my nostrils.

  Seconds after the shelling stopped, I heard a shout from somewhere down the front line, from some other foxhole. “Medic!” a voice called out, pleading, screaming. “Medic!”

  “Hey, vato.” Goldsmith let me go and met my eyes. “I think they need you.”

  He popped up and started shooting once more. I peeked out and saw that the forest in front of us was in chaos. Tall trees had fallen this way and that, like they’d been knocked down by an angry giant. Dirt and mud and deep craters broke the once-untrodden snow. And everywhere, bullets whizzed in the air.

  German soldiers in white winter uniforms ran from tree to tree, shooting in our direction. They were less than a hundred feet from us. I couldn’t believe how close they were. As soon as they stepped from the cover of the trees to run toward our front lines, our machine gunners cut them down. But more and more kept coming, waves of them, and every one of them tried to shoot us dead before we could shoot them. The air was thick with lead.

  I did not want to leave the foxhole. Why would anyone get out of a nice, safe hole in the ground to run around in the snow during a gunfight? As clearly as I could see the Germans running and falling, they would see me the moment I climbed out.

  “Medic!” Another shout. “I’m hit! Medic!”