At the same café where he’d lunched, Docker now settled at a table in the rear, as far as possible from the GIs along the zinc-topped bar. He ordered a brandy from a white-haired waiter with a towel draped over his jacket. A radio tuned to the armed forces network was playing loud country music.
Docker drank the brandy, which tasted faintly of beets and made him think of the old man they had bought vegetables from a long time ago. He opened Denise Francoeur’s letter while the brandy warmed him and the music drifted through layers of blue cigarette smoke.
Her note was brief, and Docker could imagine her pale face and black hair as he read it. The village was quiet again, she had written, the soldiers gone. She had walked into the woods on a mild afternoon and collected fresh green fir boughs and bunches of holly to put on the mantel and windowsills. The big dog — she didn’t know his name — had run away from the Bonnards. Jocko had seen it at the river one evening and was keeping a watch for it. The boy from his section, Tex Farrel (she had spelled it “Tix”), had come back to Castle Rêve to see Felice Bonnard. The nuns would keep Margret until everything was safe. On sunny afternoons, the snow was melting in the low parts of the hills and the water was collecting in puddles along the river road—
The radio music stopped and the voice of an announcer sounded sharply, silencing the noisy laughter at the bar.
“We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin from Paris. In massive attacks over the past twenty-four hours, British and American bombers have dropped thousands of tons of bombs and incendiaries on the Germany city of Dresden. In one of the heaviest raids ever launched in the European Theatre of Operations, the city has been — according to eyewitness observers — almost completely demolished. Hundreds of fires are raging through the ruins and can be seen from fifty to a hundred miles by the crewmen of approaching aircraft. American Flying Fortresses and British Lancasters have been flying round-the-clock bombing missions over the ancient city, once called by Germans ‘the Paris of the north’...”
The old waiter asked Docker if he wanted another brandy. Docker nodded, but he was hardly aware of the noisy talk resuming at the bar, or the heavy cigarette smoke mingling with the smell of damp boots and sour wine.
He was thinking of the German, Karl Jaeger, the thoughts merging with memories of Denise Francoeur. He had seen her only twice after the clash with Karl Jaeger’s tank, one night in her home and again in the square before the church where she had stood with other villagers waving to the trucks and guns of Section Eight as they wheeled through Lepont on their way west to the bivouac area at Namur. She had told him of Jaeger’s distraught behavior, the angel’s head he had smashed from the camouflaged wall and the photographs of his rosy blond daughters he had put on the pillows of her bed...
“Fire storms have gutted most of the city. Bridges have collapsed into the Elbe River. The population of Dresden has swollen recently to more than one million, every available building crowded by German refugees from the east and an unknown number of American and British prisoners of war. And because of these conditions, it is now estimated that the death toll in Dresden may exceed one hundred and fifty thousand persons—”
After an erratic burst of static, the country music sounded again and the waiter asked Docker if he wanted something to eat; he was going off duty presently but would be pleased to bring the lieutenant a sandwich if he wanted it. Docker asked the old man for another brandy.
He sat in the noisy bar trying to remember what Karl Jaeger had said to him in the last minutes of his life on the torn, rocky slope of Mont Reynard... “I give you righteousness. Condemn me if you wish, but at least I’ve lived by rules. By my rules, I have been a good soldier.”
The village of Lepont and the rooms in her home were places where he had left part of himself, he knew, as he had left something in the other towns of the war, on the roads where there had been faces and weather to remember before they were swept away into the past beyond retrieving.
Still, Denise’s letter had created a sense of a remembered permanence... the melting snow and the holly she had picked for the mantelpiece, he could see that with her eyes, and Jocko, bent and crooked, whistling in the dusk at the river’s edge for their dog... and Tex Farrel walking up the castle road again to see the girl Sonny Laurel had loved there... Docker had thought that when the hearings were over he would return to the battery by way of Lepont, but when he read the last paragraph of Denise’s letter he knew he would never do that, and knew that the village of the Salm was one more place that was gone from him. She had written:
“My husband is alive. I have a letter from him. It may be a long time but he is free and will be coming home. As I look at these words, I must say to you I feel they are like the broken links of a circle and I am able to believe my life can be whole again...”
There were a few more words, the gentle and falling close to all such letters, and then her signature, the first letters clear and precise, the rest running into jagged scratches.
Chapter Thirty-One
February 15, 1945. Hotel Empire, Liège, Belgium. Thursday, 1000 Hours.
A heavy-weather front moved toward Liège that night. Dark clouds drifted over the city the following day and the ballroom of the Empire Hotel was gloomy with shadows, the light from the chandeliers shining palely on the faded carpets.
Lieutenant Bart Whitter sat in a chair between Sergeant Corey’s desk and the conference table, dressed for his appearance at First Army’s board of special inquiry in a carefully pressed class-A uniform that included an olive drab tunic with light tan trousers and polished brown oxfords secured by leather straps.
In giving testimony Whitter frequently consulted a small black notebook and, on occasion, spoke in pronounced southern accents, apparently in deference to the major’s oak leaves and the faded swank of the ballroom.
“Ah can assure the members of this inquiry I’m clear on that point, crystal clear,” he said, in answer to a question from Captain Walton. “My orders to Docker were to proceed due east with his gun section.”
“Lieutenant Whitter, would you give us the time and date of those orders,” Karsh said.
“Yes, sir. I got that information in writing. It was about six-fifteen a.m. on December thirteenth.”
Walton said, “Did you always keep a written record of such orders?”
“When they were important, I surely did, captain. March orders to my gun sections, changes in Air Corps ID signals — things like that, they’re all written down in the book. But if it was just a piffling matter, I didn’t bother.”
“I’d like you to identify that book for the record,” Karsh said.
Whitter approached the conference table and gave the book to Walton, who flipped through it and said, “Sergeant, take this down. ‘Lieutenant Whitter referred to a personal notebook in answering questions relating to orders he gave Lieutenant Docker on thirteen December. Said questions and answers are included in transcript. The notebook pages are numbered consecutively, contain handwritten notations of orders given by the lieutenant to gun sections covering the time from’ ” — Walton looked at the first and last pages of the notebook — “ ‘from the middle of September, 1944 through January of the following year. Notes are made in both pen and pencil. The notebook is a blue-covered Cerberus, number fifty-two.’ ”
“Lieutenant Docker, you heard Lieutenant Whitter’s testimony,” Karsh said. “Did he give you such orders?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But after reaching the town of Werpen, isn’t it a fact that you withdrew several thousand yards to the west?”