Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [41]
The big guns to the north, that had been rattling the prison windowpanes for a week, were quiet now, and our guards had disappeared during the night. Before that, the only traffic on the road had been a few farmers’ carts. Now it was packed with jostling, yelling people—pushing, stumbling, swearing; trying to cross the hills to Prague before the Russians caught them.
Fear like that can spread, too, to people who don’t have anything to be afraid of. All of the people running from the Russians weren’t Germans. I remember a British lance corporal, for instance, who George and I saw strutting toward Prague as though the Devil was after him.
“Better get a move on, Yanks!” he puffed. “Rooskies only a couple of miles back, you know. Don’t want to mix it with them, do you?”
One nice thing about being half-starved, which I gather the lance corporal wasn’t, is that it’s hard to worry about anything but being half-starved. “You’ve got it all wrong, Mac,” I shouted back at him. “We’re on their side, the way I understand it.”
“They’re not asking where you’re from, Yank. They’re shooting everything they can catch for the fun of it.” He rounded the bend and was out of sight.
I laughed, but I was in for a surprise when I turned back to George. He was running his stubby fingers through his red mop of hair, and his fat moon face was white as he looked down the road in the direction the Russians would be coming from. That was something none of us had ever seen before—George afraid.
Until then, he’d been in command of every situation, whether it was with us or with the Germans. He had a thick skin, and he could bluff or wheedle his way out of anything.
Alvin York would have been impressed with some of his combat stories. We were all from the same division, except for George. He’d been brought in all by himself, and he said he’d been up front since D-Day. The rest of us were from a green outfit, captured in a breakthrough before we’d been in the line a week. George was a real campaigner, and entitled to a lot of respect. He got it; begrudged, all right, but he got it—until Jerry got killed.
“Call me a stool pigeon again, buddy, and I’ll smash your ugly face in,” I heard him tell one guy whose whispers he’d overheard. “You know damn well you’d do the same thing, if you had the chance. I’m just playing the guards for chumps. They think I’m on their side, so they treat me pretty good. I’m not hurting you none, so mind your own damn business!”
That was a few days after the break, after Jerry Sullivan got killed. Somebody’d tipped off the guards about the break, or at least it looked that way. They were waiting outside the fence, at the mouth of the tunnel, when Jerry, the first man through, crawled out. They didn’t have to shoot him, but they did. Maybe George hadn’t told the guards—but nobody gave him the benefit of that doubt when he was out of hearing.
Nobody said anything to his face. He was big and healthy, remember, and went on getting beefier and worse-tempered, while the rest of us were turning into drowsy scarecrows.
But now, with the Russians on their way, George’s nerve seemed to have given out. “Let’s make a break for Prague, Sammy. Just you and me, so we can travel fast,” he said.
“What in hell’s the matter with you?” I said. “We don’t have to run from anybody, George. We just won a war, and you’re acting like we lost one. Prague’s sixty miles away, for God’s sake. The Russians’ll be here in an hour or so, and they’ll probably send trucks to run us back to our lines. Take it easy, George—you don’t hear any shooting, do you?”
“They’ll shoot us, Sammy, sure as hell. You don’t even look like an American soldier. They’re wild men, Sammy. Come on, let’s go while we got the chance.”