George Luz

“Whattayagot there?”

I stood shivering in the drizzle near the front door and frowned at Luz, the company comedian, as raucous and funny in combat as in garrison, and O’Keefe, who was one of our younger and more gentlemanly replacements. They had just pulled up in a boatlike vehicle that resembled a miniature DUKW. A mortarman, Garcia, sat in back.

“A Schwimmwagen,” Luz replied. “Took it off a Kraut down the road.” He got out and O’Keefe and Garcia stood up in the back and heaved the front end of a large wooden packing case over the side for him to grasp.

I looked in the box. My eyes widened, for it was full of bottles. “What the hell?”

“Champagne,” O’Keefe said. He had gotten down to take the rear of the box. “O.K.,” he grunted, “I got it.” Staggering under the load, he, Garcia, and Luz started indoors. I followed them like a hungry dog.

“Where the hell?”

“Hitler’s cellar.”

“What!”

“Sure. From his hideout, the Berghof, the halfway house.”

“Well here, let me give you a hand. My God, we have to get this upstairs before McCreary sees it. I’ll be goddamned.”

We strained, stiff-armed and panting, to carry the champagne quickly beyond the reach of the second squad and unloaded it in my room, where V.D. had promised to keep an eye on it. “T.O. equipment,” Luz said. “Every man gets a jug.”

While the rest of the squad crowded around, whistling in astonishment, I dropped my voice and asked Luz and his helpers what they were waiting for. “Let’s get some more,” I suggested, snatching up my helmet and buckling on my pistol belt. We ran down to the Schwimmwagen.

McCreary was in the driver’s seat, tinkering with the starter. He smiled, blinked at us brightly and said, “Well, well, howdoyoudo. Look at the abandoned vehicle.”

“On the road, Mick,” Luz said. “Get your own kiddy car. There’s a million of ‘em at the P.W. enclosure.”

McCreary laughed and climbed out. We swarmed aboard like pirates boarding a galleon and drove off before he could discover our destination. “Well, well,” he murmured. “I’ll be goddamned.” He stared after us and chewed on his cigarette. Something was up; somebody had found a good deal somewhere. That goddamn first squad, always screwing somebody, I know it, I just know it.

But he didn’t know it was Hitler.

Luz was at the wheel and he was in his element – noisy recklessness. “I should have been a midget-auto racer,” he remarked, zooming into the first curve. He slammed on the brakes. The Schwimmwagen skidded around the corner, and he spun the wheel and straightened her out. My heart beat in my throat. Garcia and O’Keefe clutched the side and said nothing.

“Out of the way, you sonsabitches!” Luz roared at the night. He gunned the motor, pressing on the horn, and blared his way through Berchtesgaden at fifty miles an hour. “Goddamn Nazis.”

I nodded and looked ahead, grating my teeth together and blinking at the darkness. “Oh my God,” I gasped as he headed straight for a stone wall. I braced my feet against the floorboards, stiffened my legs, and closed my eyes. We skidded again, and I opened my eyes and saw the wall go by six inches away. “Sieg oder Sibierien” was painted on the wall in huge white letters.

Victory or Siberia, I thought. If Goebbels could only see us now.

Luz hurtled recklessly through the wet streets to the south end of town and across the narrow bridge there. We passed a concrete blockhouse and the high, barbed-wire fence that bounded Hitler’s private mountain and then started uphill.

A G.I. with the 3rd Division patch on sleeve reeled and retched his way down the middle of the road. Luz honked and told him to get out of the way, but he was too happy to care. He had a bottle of champagne in one hand and a P-38 in the other. “Whoopee!” he shouted, firing the pistol in the air, bambam.

“We have to hurry,” Luz said. “The dogfaces are drinking it dry.” He pushed the accelerator to the floor and swung wide to pass a slow moving G.I. truck filled with shouting Frenchmen. A command car hurtled out of the darkness at him, and he jerked the Schwimmwagen back to the right with such force that it skidded sideways until it stopped two feet away from the edge of an immense bomb crater.

The craters were all around us now, but fortunately none of them blocked the road. There were shattered trees and grotesque ruins of barracks and other buildings on both sides. The torn, volcanic landscape looked like the surface of the moon.

Luz cursed and jammed on the brakes and barely missed knocking down two drunken paratroopers stumbling along the right side of the road with their arms over each others shoulders. They were singing “When the war is over, we will all enlist again,” and they had soon wandered from the pavement to sit in a muddy field and hold their heads awhile.

Luz accelerated. It seemed as if the whole world were racing for the Berghof, and he didn’t want to come in last. The higher he went, the thicker grew the stream of vehicles, until it became an almost solid mass, bumper to bumper. Recon cars, command cars, jeeps, D.U.K.W.s, halftracks, Volkswagens, Schwimmwagens—all were headed for the wine cellar. Luz drove on the left and passed as many of them as he could, but eventually the traffic was so thick he had to fall in line.