Fleeing the Children's Crusade

FLEEING THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE

CHAPTER ONE

I just wanted to run away, it would have been easier, but I was stuck with what came to most boys who made it past sixteen: gray uniforms, steel helmets, an obligation to fulfill. Still I ran for another purpose and under orders, not the same as running away. For away lay an unknown place, a fleeing from manhood, leaving everything behind to do a thing no one had done before. I knew the fallibility of our Führer, and the futility of being better than everyone else, but I was afraid to act upon my longing to escape. I could not deny that the Führer was my father, a forebear demanding obedience. I soon became disheartened with the same doors everyone took to enter into quarters overseen by him. I knew what an open window late at night meant if I could just leap out of it fast enough before being caught. The outside did smell much sweeter. Despite the strain of his false teachings, my paternal father still found room to frolic in my thoughts. He mocked our attempts to please our Führer and let me live in a reverie of boyhood memories, until one day in generosity, he showed me the way of escape from his house.

It was Germany in 1944, and autumn, although it seemed too muddy and wet to have given hint upon this worse of deadening seasons. The muck lay frozen everywhere: upon rocks, blanketing bases of pines like slops from an overflowing latrine. Its stench rose with a stinky and asphyxiating nature, made worse from festering under the sun, and as we ran upon it, our sergeant, Lessing, worsened our travails by forcing us to take it in haste.

"Garbage! You’re all garbage!" he shouted as he ran ahead. "I am not your youth instructor, you bastards. Some of you think your youth instructor is still here to clean your dirty shoes, but he’s not. Stop your childish games. No more, I tell you. Enough nonsense!"

I did not listen to much of what he said, being an ignorant soldier who had just passed my seventeenth birthday. Besides, Hitlerjugend, soon to join the ranks of the Waffen SS, were not meant to think but to do, and I was busy obeying instinct. We wore gray tunics and trousers of such coarse fibers charges sprang amongst the hairs on my legs. Each shift from a pant leg sent a bolt of lightning up from the ground into my crouch. The pain was made even worse by the weight of boots, kept at a painful cant above my head, their laces dangling, but the soles at such a tilt towards the sky they proved abidance to Lessing’s punishment.

"Come on you bastards!" Lessing cried.

"Ja Oberscharführer!" we replied.

"Der Führer raises soldiers, not gasping swine," he shouted again as he thrust himself into a thicket, bending branches in his charge, and like a whip, these bent appendages lashed back at soldiers behind him.

Of course, Hermann ran behind us, beaten by shame for his failure to spit shine boots. He could not help himself, could not even put up a fight against a child. He looked small and frail, except for his hearty ears. Some of the boys taunted him with cries of, “untermenschen”, or underman, for his impudence and physical fallacies, others made a dash next to him to flick his lobes He screamed in agony after each flick.

"Come on, Hermann. Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!" Lessing yelled.

Lessing’s bulging arms swung under the fold of his shirt as he went to a tree limb and tore off a branch. Below the bill of his steel helmet, his blue eyes seemed to dart about above cheeks of tight pink skin.

"Don’t fall behind, Hermann!" he shouted. "Or you’ll have me at your heels!"

"Come on, Hermann," I blurted, in an attempt to show sympathy for him. "Come on."

"Do you need help?" asked another boy. Hermann gasped, yet, in response to my chants of encouragement, he never gave a sign of faltering in his pace.

“Hermann you can do this, just keep up with me,” I said to him.

Still, he began to fall back, slowed down by exhaustion. Lessing saw him lag and a smile curled from his lips. We knew it was not good to see that smile.

"Achtung!" he ordered.

We snapped to attention on the muddy trail under the shade of a spruce, all eighteen of us with our mouths agape, savoring each quick breath.

"Shut your panting faces!” Lessing snarled. "You sicken me. All of you. You're not the select few we need against Ivan. You’re just a bunch of babies who still need a stick to your behinds. Run in place, damn you! Run in place, you swines of muck! And, Hermann…"

Our noses snorted out short clouds, but they were powerful puffs, as the legs below went up and down in place, quick to match each other's stomp against the mud. The filth thrown by the movement of our numb feet sent clods of earth into the air; flung high, they hit the bottoms of the boots hanging above in our aching hands.

"Hermann,” Lessing roared. "They gave me a reason to come here. And it's not to slow down for a sheisskopf with legs." He gave him a menacing look. "You hear me, Hermann? Do you want to give up or run?"

"Run, Oberscharführer," he choked out and his squat legs struck the ground more quickly as he strove to run in place.

"Then show a worthy effort."

"Ja Oberscharführer," Hermann wheezed.

"Run. Don't talk…just run. Save your breath."

The poor boy ran in place without respite. His nostrils flared, breaths became a wheeze, but his legs kept at a sprint, knee up, knee down, going ever faster, or face a foul retort from Lessing.

"Aaaah!" Hermann cried as fatigue deadened his shanks. His cheeks suffused with blood while the sweat descended from under his helmet to drown his eyes. He did put up a struggle.

“Don't think of giving up,” Lessing shouted.

"Relief, Oberscharführer!" Hermann squealed.

"Don’t talk."

I was so glad it was not me running in place at cruel speed in front of Lessing. I could feel the pain in my calves start to climb into my lower limbs as we marked time with our bursting lungs.

" Schnell! Schnell! Schnell! Faster, Hermann! Faster!"

"Ja Oberscharführer," the small boy wheezed. He ran to the point of exhaustion. His breathing was painful to us. I could hear his lungs desperately inhaling oxygen to keep him on his feet.

The sergeant’s face turned ugly, wrinkles in his forehead becoming furrows, his eyes swelling out belligerently below thick blond brows.

"Hop! Hop! Hop! Hop!" he shouted.

I rapidly thrust my feet in and out of the mud to keep pace with the others, my arms sagging from the weight of the boots. I could only imagine the pain Hermann felt as his body strained to endure the merciless demands.

When Hermann could take no more punishment, his legs buckled and he fell flat into the mud. He dove into the slop headfirst. He lay there whining in long gasps of misery. I thought he would break right there and cry, but he looked up at our sergeant and got to his feet. Hermann’s standing did not impress Lessing.

"So you want to give up, eh? Do you want to know what happens to those who give up? They get killed or kill themselves."

"Nein, Oberscharführer!"

"No?"

"Nein, Oberscharführer," he gasped.

"You run,” Lessing ordered. "I don't care if you can't breathe. Run! Get up front of the herd! You’re going to lead us the whole sprint."

Hermann, broken by Lessing’s physical tortures, found it too hard to rush far in front of us. When he got to the head of the pack at a limp and made a vain attempt to run, the boys in the lead kicked his heels. They would neither go around him nor did they slow down. When we got to the clearing, Hermann's trousers and shirt were muddied. The sergeant ran aside to let the soldiers charge forth at their physical limits.

A trance began to set into my mind. I saw only the horizon with its tall blades of grass and the sun overhead. What was it all for? I thought of children who were too young to join the ranks. Instead of being forced to run, eat a strict diet, and keep awake all night to do watches, they were given drink and rest. Every morning we awakened not to the ring of clocks or the affectionate touch of a mother’s hand, but to shouts and chants similar to those yelled down on miscreant dogs, and were then sent to run the same windy trails and mountains only to return into camp hoping for relief.

Out beyond the edge of the wood in the gray offshoots of the clearing the trail led to canvas tents. We hung our undergarments on lines strung between these shelter tops. We were allowed time only to give the clothes a swipe with a scrub brush, dunk them in a wash basin and then throw them on the line. Many of the garments hung dirty with stains under their sleeves. A large steel washbasin and an outside fuel tank equipped with a showerhead were all we had to keep our bodies clean. Two men were now standing by it. They wore long, black watchcoats and distinctive officer caps. We had not seen them there before; they were men of respectable rank, and one of them laughed at us as we ran out of the forest.

"Go to your tents,” Lessing ordered when he saw the two strangers in the camp.

Even with the sweat blurring my vision, I could see these men. Their eyes seemed in shadow under the rims of their caps, and they often dropped their gazes away from us to look down at the ground.

When I caught up with Hermann, his face was flushed. He breathed hard through his mouth, almost unable to speak.

"Let's get into the tent," I said to him.

"Can't," the boy wailed. "Please. . ."

Hermann sank to his knees in the grass. I got him back up by hugging his armpits.

"Come on, we’ve got to get over there," I said.

"Can't."

"Yes, you can. It's only right there." I pointed at the tent. The wind made ripples in the cover cloth and the wooden poles bulged from behind the canvas.

"My feet… they hurt," he said.

"But we’ve got to," I said.

Hermann worked up enough strength to stand, so I let go of him. He put his hand on my shoulder to steady his balance as we lumbered toward the camp.

"You know, you shouldn't have done that," I said.

"Otto!" he gasped. "I've got my lesson for not shining my boots."

"You're going to get more than a lesson," I said, watching a grasshopper glide past, fluttering its leaden wings over the waist-high grass. "That Lessing, you know, he's a sergeant who won't let a thing die."

"Don't," he muttered, and I saw he was about to cry.

"None of that…none of the crying. It won't do."

"But… it's so hard.” He bent his head down, so I would not see him pout under the steel helmet.

"It’s tough, I know," I said. "But you don't see me crying over it."