The Man with the Iron Heart Read Online Free

soldiers, he knew better.
    He went over anyway and trained a camera on the bodies. “I hate taking pictures of these poor guys, you know?” he said, snapping away anyhow. “But I gotta have something to bring back to Nuremberg so the big shots there can see what happened.”
    “You better be careful, sir,” Sergeant Benton said.
    “How come? Is the ground mined?” Lou stood as still as if he intended to take root right where he was. And if Benton nodded or said yes, that would be about the safest thing he could do.
    But the noncom shook his head. “Nah—didn’t mean that. You keep talkin’ the way you are, though, people’re liable to reckon you’re a human being or somethin’.”
    “Oh.” Lieutenant Weissberg wondered how to take that. To ordinary grunts, CIC officers probably
weren’t
human beings, if by human beings you meant those who lived the same way they did. Lou had fired his carbine exactly once during the war, when his outfit almost got overrun during the Battle of the Bulge. He’d slept warm and eaten well, unlike most mudfaces. Therefore…this was likely a genuine compliment. He treated it as one, answering, “Thank you, Sergeant.”
    “You’re welcome, sir,” Benton said seriously. “I figured you’d be one o’ them behind-the-lines assholes…uh, no offense. But you don’t want to be doing this shit, neither.”
    “You better believe it,” Lou said. “Somebody has to, though. German army surrendered. Unfuckingconditionally surrendered. If they think they can get away with crap like this…”
    “What do we do about it?” Benton asked. “Take hostages and shoot ’em if the mothers who did this don’t turn themselves in? That’s what the Jerries woulda done, and you can take it to the bank.”
    “I know.” Lou’s voice was troubled. “All kinds of things the Jerries would’ve done that I don’t want anything to do with.”
    Toby Benton eyed the CIC man in a way he’d seen before: as someone who knew the straight skinny and might be tempted into talking about it. “That stuff they say about those camps—Dachau an’ Belsen an’ them all—they really that bad?”
    “No,” Lou said tightly. Just when Benton started to breathe a sigh of relief, he went on, “They’re worse. They’re a thousand times worse, maybe a million. Far as I’m concerned, we should hang all the
mamzrim
who ran ’em. And you know what else? I think we’re going to.”
    “If that shit is true—Jesus!—we ought to.” Sergeant Benton paused. “The what? Mom-something?”
    “Oh.” Weissberg realized what he’d said. “It’s Yiddish. Means
bastards.
And they are.”
    “I ain’t arguin’.” Benton eyed him again, this time not as a source but in another way he’d seen before. “Yiddish, huh? You’re, uh, a Jewish fella?”
    “Guilty,” Lou said. How many Jews had the sergeant seen before? If he came off an Oklahoma farm, maybe not many. And was he a Regular Army guy or a draftee? Lou thought he might be career military, and not many Jews were.
    “You
really
don’t like the krauts then, right?”
    “You might say so, Sergeant. Yeah, you just might. If they were all in hell screaming for water, I’d pull up with a gasoline truck.”
    “Heh.” Benton let out only a syllable’s worth of laughter, but his eyes sparked. “I like that—damned if I don’t.”
    “Glad you do.” Lou came back over to the crater. “Me, I don’t like
this.
If the Germans think they can fuck around with us while we’re occupying their country…” His voice trailed away. What exactly could—would—the United States do about it?
    “Awful lot of guys just want to head on home an’ pick up their lives where they left off,” Sergeant Benton remarked. “Hell, I sure do.” He
was
a draftee, then.
    “I know. So do I,” Lou said. He’d been teaching high school English in Jersey City when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. Nothing would make him happier than going back to diagramming sentences.