I was reading a radio play, “I have No Prayer,“ produced during
Second World War by the American Latvian-Jewish playwright Arch
Oboler. It treats a tank crew as a “melting pot,” composed of men
from all over the United States, sharing almost nothing except the
common fact of being Americans. The tank is eventually destroyed at
the battle of Kasserine Pass, with one of the crew members, the Jew
from Chicago, being killed.
So I thought I might have a go at retelling the story for our time.
The tank was a German Leopard II, which had been furnished to
Poland, subject to certain conditions about its use. It had been
christened Perun, after the ancient Slavic god of thunder. The
United States, not being subject to the same political constraints
as the German government, agreed to furnish Poland with Abrams tanks
fo use in the Ukraine while the German government was still locked
in indecision. The tank wound up being reassigned to a new unit of
Poles who would go to the Ukraine. In a nod to history, and the 1683
Siege of Vienna, this unit was christened The Winged Hussars.
Sergeant Andrej Staviskski, the Polish commander, had been the
tank’s loader. However, when crews for the new American tanks were
being scraped together, the senior men were reassigned. It was felt
that with their greater training and experience, they would be more
able to cope with unfamiliar equipment. Andrej, at the age of
twenty-five, was now the tank commander, with such crew as the army
could find for him. Andrej’s great-great-grandfather had been killed
during the Polish Home Army uprising In Warsaw in 1944.
Corporal Hans Geyr von Adlersburg, the twenty-seven-year-old German
gunner, had been a Lutheran divinity student from Lubeck. He had
been a “late entrant” to divinity school, having reached the
conclusion that he did not really want to study Commercial Law as
his family expected. He was a “von und zu,” his father was a
successful business executive, and he had no identifiable career or
economic motivation for joining the German army, certainly not as an
enlisted man, as he did. When asked why, he could only answer by
referring to the films of Ingmar Bergman, especially The
Seventh Seal and Winter Light. As his tank crew-mates would
eventually discover, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly
everything relating to Ingmar Bergman. His family’s reaction was one
of resigned exasperation. As his father put, “first, you want to be
a saint, now you want to be a crusader. Well, you’ll need a bigger
allowance…” Hans did essentially perfectly in training, and,
resisting all efforts to divert him into something more appropriate,
such as Intelligence, found his way to an anti-tank unit, where he
rapidly became an exemplary gunner. His family was not altogether
surprised by what he did next. After carefully collecting notarized
copies of his school, university, and military service records, he
deserted, crossed into Poland, and joined the Polish army. The
Polish recruiting officer read the notarized documents with some
surprise, did a bit of internet searching to find out all about the
“von und zu,” and the father’s business, and laughed gently: “my
boy, how would you like to be a Winged Hussar?” Hans’s family
continued his allowance at his new address, and set the family
lawyer to see about “regularizing” his status with the Bundeswehr.
Lance Corporal Caitlyn O’Donnell, the nineteen-year-old driver, was
from Castlebar, in the Irish county of Mayo, in the province, or
ancient kingdom, of Connaught. At the age of fifteen, she had run
away from a convent school, and an abusive stepfather, and
made her way to Waterford, in the Irish province of Leinster, where
she had become a heavy equipment operator. The Polish army had
decided that someone who could drive one kind of heavy tracked
vehicle could probably drive another kind, and had put the word out
on industry blogs. They could not actually recruit in Ireland, which
is a non-NATO member, so Caitlyn had to make her way, at her own
expense, to Paris, where the Polish military attache signed her up,
and gave her a rail voucher to Warsaw.
Trooper Juan Acosta the loader, was from a small town in
Estremadura, famously the poorest province in Spain, but also the
place which had produced both Hernando Cortez and Francisco Pizzaro,
the great conquistadors. Apart from being from Estremadura, Juan was
also gay. The Spanish army became aware of this when he overslept,
and overstayed his pass by two hours, arriving at the barracks at 10
AM instead of the prescribed 8 AM. In the subsequent enquiries, it
emerged that he had been sleeping with a boy instead of a girl. From
that time on, the NCO’s “picked on him.” His rifle was always found
to be dirty, his bed was always found to be badly made, etc. His
leave was stopped. At length, he jumped the fence, went to a bar,
got drunk and into a minor affray, and was picked up by the police
and delivered back to the army. When he got out of the guardhouse,
it was intimated to him that his sins might be forgiven if he
applied for secondment to the Polish army.
When a draft of replacements, including Hans, Caitlyn, and Juan,
arrived at the Winged Hussars encampment, the three of them were
sent out to Andrej’s tank, a gunner, a driver, and someone who was
neither.
Hans‘s previous military training was so closely aligned with his
current role that it only took him a couple of days to get up to
speed. He had to adjust to dismantling and reassembling things in
the confined space of the turret, rather than laying everything out
on tarpaulins on the ground, but that was about it. After that,
Andrej had him instruct Juan, and, later, Caitlyn, in gunnery.
Caitlyn was a bit more complicated. She was already a much better
driver in the abstract than Andrej was, but she still had a fair
amount to learn about the peculiarities of a Leopard tank. It took
her a couple of weeks to surpass Andrej. At that point, he sent her
along to the squadron motor sergeant for final instruction. By this
time, she was also instructing Hans and Juan in tank-driving.
After the first couple of weeks, Andrej shifted to instructing
everyone in single-tank-level tactics. As time permitted, they all
instructed Caitlyn in small arms. By traditional military standards,
it was totally disorganized process, but it was a rational
allocation of existing skills.
The common language of the tank was of course English— it could
hardly have been anything else. However, Caitlyn being Caitlyn, the
men picked up a couple of hundred words of Gaelic. Andrej
occasionally used bits of of Gaelic when speaking— in Polish— over
the radio, and this led to the witticism “Perun and its Wild Geese.”
Hans was talking to his mother regularly on the cellphone,
giving her a running account of his experiences and impressions. She
did not bother to tell him that she was recording everything for
posterity. His communications with his father were a bit more
strained and “correct.” Thus, Frau Geyr had been introduced to the
rest of the tank crew, and had eyed Caitlyn, with her petite
figure,white skin, long black hair, and blue eyes, with the sort of
speculative interest which mothers commonly give to young girls
their sons bring home. Herr Geyr, on being informed that his son was
now a corporal and a tank gunner, had allowed himself a wintry
smile. It was not, of course, as good as being a captain in the
Bundeswehr— but for the time being, it would do.
When Hans discovered that Caitlyn had not spoken to her mother for
four years, he insisted that this was not acceptable, and that she
must resume contact. Andrej nodded agreement. In non-military
matters, he was inclined to defer to Hans, whom he called “Padre.”
Caitlyn tried the old phone number, but it had been disconnected.
She was quite willing to leave it at that.
However, Hans was not. He would have, in due course, made a good
clergyman. He placed a call to his father’s office in Lubeck,
and spoke to his father’s secretary, Fraulein Beate.
Fraulein Beate already knew about Caitlyn, from conversations with
Hans’s mother. “Yes, Master Hans, leave it all to me.” She
contacted the firm’s representative in Cork. The representative
began making inquiries, and, within two hours, he had located
Caitlyn’s mother at an address in Shannon. Of course, he also
obtained a telephone number, and a certain amount of additional
information. He was an Irishman, but working for a German firm, he
had developed habits of thoroughness. He was, for example, able to
inform Fraulein Beate that Caitlyn’s father was no longer employed,
having been sacked for cause, but was living on the proceeds of his
wife’s eighty-hour-a-week, minimum-wage employment. Likewise, that
his departure from Castlebar had involved an informal “suggestion”
from the local Gardai sergeant. Fraulein Beate’s lips tightened
slightly when she heard this, but she thanked the Irishman
effusively, and made a quick call to Frau Geyr, mostly to vent to a
sympathetic audience. They agreed that there was no need to tell
Hans about the Gardai sergeant. Hans had asked for a telephone
number, and that was what he should get.
Hans, on being told the telephone number, and that it was in
Shannon, not Castlebar, casually thanked Fraulein Beate, and made
the call himself.
Mrs. Shaunessy, ex O’Donnell, was somewhat flabbergasted to discover
not only, that her daughter was now a heavy equipment operator,
making, in peacetime, more than her husband had ever made, but that
she was now in the Polish Army, driving a tank. Mrs. Shaunessy
looked at the three young men behind Caitlyn, Hans, big and blonde,
Andrej, with his tartar features, and Juan, romantically swarthy,
and felt a certain resentment.
At this point, Mr. Shaunessy came into the room, and the
conversation took a turn for the worse. “Dirtied bit of fluff” was
one of the more unfortunate and unforgivable expressions he used.
As the connection was broken, Juan announced his intention of
visiting Shannon at the earliest possible opportunity, and
eviscerating Mr Shaunessy with a trench knife. Hans shook his head
ruefully: “Forgive me, Caitlyn, alana, you were quite right to run
away. Never mind, we are your family now.”
A desperate Russia began making greater and greater demands on
Belarus. The Lukashenko government played for time, handing over
more and more of its heavy weapons, tanks, fighting vehicles,
artillery, and aircraft, not to mention the ammunition and other
supplies which went with them. However the Russians merely
squandered these in the Ukraine, and came back demanding more.
Matters reached the point where schools and official youth clubs
(young pioneers, etc.), armed with ancient Mousin-Nagant rifles were
in a position to challenge the police and the army.
Then it came. Russia eventually demanded that the Wagner Group
be allowed to conduct conscription in Belarus, to provide men for
its human-wave attacks in the Donbas. This was the final straw, and
there was an uprising in Minsk, which spread like wildfire. A
Russian force was sent to quell the uprising. As military forces
went, it was not a very formidable force, but it was thought that it
would be sufficient against largely unarmed civilian rioters.
The Polish government took immediate action to prevent this. The
Winged Hussars, who were on the point of departure for the Ukraine,
were reassigned to Belarus. Their orders were, quite simply, to get
out in front of Minsk, if possible, and prevent it from being
over-run. They made it to Minsk in time, finding the city in the
hands of the rebels. They passed through the city, to the cheers of
the population, and proceeded up the M1 highway in the direction of
Smolensk. They got about thirty miles before making contact with the
Russians about midnight, in the neighborhood of the town of
Zhodzina. South of the town, the highway crossed a low wooded ridge.
The Hussars gained this ridge, and saw a lot of burning to the north
and east. Some sort of battle seemed to be going on at the eastern
edge of Zhodzina, but the most urgent task was to prevent the
Russians from proceeding along the highway.
Perun was positioned on the extreme left of the Hussars position,
and they immediately began using blocks of TNT to form a crater,
which could be turned into a tank pit. The company had “acquired” a
backhoe, and Caitlyn used this with practiced skill to square off
the corners of their own tank pit, then of their neighbors tank
pits.
A little boy of five or so stumbled into their position. He told
them that his name was Pavel, but did not know his last name. He was
apparently from one of the burnt-out villages a mile or so to the
north. Caitlyn held him in her lap in the driver’s seat of the
backhoe, feeding him an endless supply of American junk food, while
operating the machine. Each crew crew they dug in had a thank-you
present, a candy bar, or a package of cookies. When everyone was dug
in, she took Pavel with her back to the tank.
Andrej looked at them with some resignation: “So we are now a
nursery school? Never mind, bring him aboard.”
Juan had mugs of hot gazpacho for them, made Estremadura-fashion,
with pepper and garlic.
They did not have very much time to drink it, though. On being
informed that his tanks were all dug in, Colonel Sosabowski had
decided to take a hand in the battle below. Orders were passed to go
to battle stations. As before, Caitlyn kept Pavel in her lap in the
driver’s seat.
The colonel ordered five rounds of fire from each tank, to
start with Russian tanks, and then proceed to personnel
carriers. This destroyed most of the Russian vehicles. A second
salvo produced a panicked rout, men jumping out of vehicles,
throwing down their small arms, and runnin off into the distance.
Nothing much happened before morning. At that point, the colonel
decided it was time to establish communication with Zhodzina. It
turned out that cellphones still worked, and the mayor answered his
published telephone number. Yes, they were all right, and they had
not sustained too many casualties. Soviet era ferro-concrete
construction was really very bulletproof. They could use some rocket
propelled grenades, and the colonel promised to see what he could do
about expediting a delivery.
By this time, the colonel had been informed of Pavel’s presence, and
thought it would be a good idea to send him home. But the mayor
informed him that the Russians had hosed those buildings down with
flame throwers, and there had been no survivors. Ah, there was a
little boy? Well, the mayor had gotten his non-combatants away a
couple of hours before dawn, and there was no one to look after a
child. Could the Winged Hussars keep him until the situation
clarified itself?
When the Russian fugitives reached their own lines, in small groups,
about mid-morning , they were all stood up against walls and shot,
as the only way to contain the panic.
And then the main force began to advance, along the highway.
By noon, Colonel Sosabowski was advised that Polish reinforcements
had reached Minsk, including the airfield, that air superiority was
in effect, that he could expect drone support if he needed it, and
that ground reinforcements should reach him sometime in the
afternoon.
The drones picked up the Russian main column about ten miles out,
and began pounding away at it. So it was only a severely diminished
remnant which came within view of the Hussars position about three
o’clock. By that time, reinforcements had arrived at the foot of the
western slope, and a liaison officer had been sent forward, to
arrange about passing them through. There was no sense in the
Russian assault which followed, obsolete tanks in the open against
modern tanks in tank pits, with reinforcements just over the hill.
Predictably, the Russians got slaughtered.
It was pure bad luck that the Russian shell struck Perun’s
gunsight window, and even worse luck that Juan had been in the act
of taking a round from the magazine. Andrej, Hans, and Juan were
all killed instantly in the ensuing explosion. Caitlyn, in the
driver’s seat, popped her hatch open, and leaped upwards, propelling
Pavel before her. She was burned on her back and legs. Pavel, having
been in her lap, did not get burned, but his wrist got broken
somewhere in the process. They landed on the ground, and Caitlyn
pulled herself to her feet, picked up Pavel, and managed to stumble
a hundred feet before collapsing in a small hollow. That was just
enough to protect them from the fireworks as the tank destroyed
itself.
The Russian tank which had fired the fatal shell was itself
destroyed approximately two minutes later.
They lay there for about an hour, as relieving units moving along
the highway swept the battle away from them to the eastward, and
then the Winged Hussars found them, drawn by the noise of Pavel
crying. Caitlyn was by this time unconscious. They were loaded, both
of them, into a single stretcher, and the stretcher went into first
medical evacuation helicopter to arrive in the area. This carried
them to the airfield at Minsk, where they were rapidly transferred
to an American C-130 bound for Warsaw. The American flight surgeon
put a cast on Pavel’s wrist, and set about debriding Caitlyn’s
burns. Once at the hospital in Warsaw, someone proposed removing
Pavel to the children’s ward, but he screamed enough that they
abandoned the idea, in the mistaken belief that Caitlyn was his
mother, or something like that.
It was there that Frau Geyr found them, two days later. She spoke to
the doctors, who admitted they were overstretched, and agreed that
Hamburg would have much better facilities for reconstructive work.
So it was arranged to take Caitlyn and Pavel back to Lubeck by
private air ambulance. The doctors at Lubeck decided that Caitlyn
could be cared for at home, with nurses sent in, and she was shortly
installed in Hans’s old bedroom.
They found that Herr Geyr had just received a paper from the
Bundeswehr. It amounted to an agreement to pretend that Hans had
never enlisted in the Bundeswehr in the first place, and a
stipulation that certain sums were due for improperly disbursed pay,
food, housing, etc. Herr Geyr wrote a check on the spot, and then,
he wrote across the document, in large, accusing black letters, “Fur
Deutschland und Europa Gefallen, Zhodzina, Bylorussia, 19.8.2023.”
Then he circulated copies of both document and check to friends,
relatives, business associates, the newspapers in Lubeck and
Hamburg, and, in fact, anyone he could think of. To the great
embarrassment of the Minister, the army had already cashed the check
before the matter became public knowledge. It proved impossible to
refund it. Herr Geyr was not to be bought off that cheaply.
Predictably, the Russian Ambassador to Germany denounced Hans,
as a covert agent of the Germans government.
The Russian ambassador to Ireland, with his usual stupidity,
attempted to interview Mr. Shaunessy, but Fraulein Beate had already
spoken to a certain Gardai sergeant in Castlebar. “Don’t worry,
ma’am, he won’t say anything, I’ve got way too much on him.” The
ambassador was therefore reduced to vague generalities, such as
“scarlet whore of Babylon.”
Juan came in for his share of denunciation, as “proof of the moral
decadence of the west.” The Spanish Army, for once, did the right
thing, with a posthumous promotion to sergeant major, which gave his
parents a considerably larger pension.
Oddly enough, no one denounced Andrej. The Polish mind was obviously
so made-up that even the Russians could recognize it as a futile
enterprise.
The hospital at Lubeck believed in keeping chronic patients at home
as much as possible. Patients at home seemed to do better. There was
much less risk of opportunistic infections, for one thing. It was
much better to push telepresence and visiting nurses to their
utmost.
So Caitlyn mostly remained ensconced in Hans’s, room, together with
his effects, notably his library. As expected, there was a more or
less complete collection of Ingmar Bergman (video disks and
screenplays in book form). There were, of course ,school and
university textbooks. Commercial Law and Lutheran Theology were to
be expected, of course. However she discovered that in secondary
school, Hans had “split the difference, taking
Mathematics, Latin, and Chinese. This last had been a compromise
with his father, who pointed out, even if Chinese was a useful
commercial language, it was also a great literary language, with its
own autonomous philosophical traditions. In the last year or so,
Hans had been reading military history, no doubt under the influence
of current events.
Hans’s laptop was there, as well, having been left behind as
unsuited to the life of a soldier. Apart from his assorted notes and
writings, it had a backup account for the cellphone which had been
destroyed along with its owner in Perun.
(As part of a standard checklist, all cellphones had been
turned off and placed in tinfoil bags as the tanks formed up to
leave the encampment in Poland. The Winged Hussars did _not_ leak
electronic intelligence!)
Herr Geyr, on being informed of this, took measures to preserve all
the information before Apple, In California, might realize that the
cellphone no longer existed, and delete the data.
Caitlyn started reading things which Hans had written at the age of
fifteen, when she herself would have been seven, a year before her
own father’s death in a construction accident. These were naturally
more immediately accessible than things he had written as a young
man.
When she began to read Lutheran Theology, she began to understand
what Hans had meant when he observed that Bergmanism was simply
Lutheranism, adapted for a time when God was dead.
Out of a sense of duty, she ventured into Commercial Law, and, while
she felt no inclination to become a Commercial Lawyer, it really
wasn’t quite as bad as Hans had made out.
In the end, she was never quite sure whether Hans had said something
to her, or whether she had found it in his papers. In a way, it was
the strangest possible kind of honeymoon.
Eventually Caitlyn was fit enough to get out and around, and she
started accompanying Herr Geyr to his office. They didn’t have any
construction machinery, but they did have some small intricate
machines, used in various kinds of precision manufacturing. So she
began learning all about those, and soon became everyone’s favorite
apprentice. Herr Geyr watched the process with quiet approval. All
Germany loves a good craftsman (or craftswoman), and there was no
real need for the next head of the firm to be a university graduate.
Frau Geyr made another attempt to contact Mrs. Shaunessy, but this
time, she was careful not to involve Caitlyn. The girl was under
enough stress as it was. Mrs. Shaunessy did not appear particularly
moved by the story of what had happened in Belarus, or by the report
of her daughter’s injuries. Frau Geyr explained that Caitlyn would
be living with the Geyr family, as a daughter, and would not be
returning to Ireland in the foreseeable future. This last did seem
to please Mrs. Shaunessy slightly, and when given an assurance of
assistance in any difficulties she might fall Into, she warmed up a
bit more.
Meanwhile, Pavel lived a cheerfully uncomplicated life, the darling
of his “grossmutti,” who humorously compared him to “Snapper,” in
Thomas Mann’s _Disorder and Early Sorrow _.
Enquiries into Pavel’s identity proved problematic. The mayor of
Zhodzina, when applied to, said that the cottages had been derelict
after 1990, but that they had been bought and fixed up by city
people, from Minsk, who commuted into Minsk every day, and rented to
other city people, who also commuted. In cases of rental, the
landlord was often living next door, and therefore in no position to
answer enquiries, and all these people didn’t do their shopping in
Zhodzina, and he had only an approximate idea of who lived there.
The place was like a summer hotel, city people wanting to live in
thatched cottages whose charm entirely escaped the locals.
Pavel had a reasonable command of English for his age, with a BBC
accent. Well, naturally, replied the mayor. Everyone knows that BBC
English is the best kind, and you sit a child in front of the BBC
television to learn it.
A British forensics team eventually arrived, to undertake the
gruesome of finding burned bodies, and extracting DNA. However no
results could be expected for years. A swab from Pavel was sent
along as a matter of course, but then Herr Geyr set about legally
adopting him. On the place on the form where date and place of birth
were requested, he wrote “~2018, found by the tank Perun on the
field of battle, Zhodzina, Bylorussia, 18/19.8.2023. For father, he
wrote Cpl. Hans Geyr von Adlersburg, Polish Army,” thus claiming
Pavel as his (presumptively illegitimate) grandson. He knew Hans
would not object. The field for mother, he left blank, not feeling
at liberty to commit Caitlyn to the imposture. It was different for
a girl, especially a girl who would have been thirteen years at the
estimated date of conception.
Five years later, in 2028, a maternity hospital in Minsk got some
grant money to gene-sequence some of its old biological
samples. This turned up a match, a baby born on March 3, 2018.
According to the case notes, the mother did not have proper papers,
but was believed to be an illegal Russian immigrant, probably from
Sankt Petersburg. The author of the case notes did not state any
grounds for this belief, and, when contacted at his new home in
Argentina, was not able to remember the case, even when shown copies
of the case notes. It was just another uncomplicated birth, and
those tended to run together in the memory. Likewise, there were so
many women who had not cared to show him their passports…. The
address given to the hospital was that of a rooming house, where
people were always coming and going, and the woman who had kept it
had since died. The trail was cold.