PART1
PRELUDE
CHAPTER1
YPRES, BELGIUM—APRIL20, 1915
On the eve of the war crime, Max Benesch was crouched in a trench on the western front. The shelling had paused and the battlefield was calm, except for sporadic barks of machine guns. He joined a small group of his fellow German soldiers who were gathered around a metal container, reminiscent of a tarnished milk can. Taking turns, they scooped tins of watered-down potato soup laced with specks of beef sinew.
Max—a tall, lean man with hair and eyes the color of chestnuts—took a spoonful of soup, bland and cold. He looked at Jakob, a haggard boyish-faced soldier. “The war will soon be over, and you’ll be devouring sauerbraten and spätzle.”
Jakob, his eyes dark with fatigue, smiled and spooned a bit of soup.
The trench, a three-meter-deep by two-meter-wide excavation, stretched for over twenty kilometers through the Belgian area of Flanders, creating a semicircular front line. The Imperial German Army had acquired higher ground, and they had the Allies—French, British, Canadian, and Belgian troops—partially surrounded. But the transport of soldiers to the eastern front to fight the Russians had depleted German forces. Both sides were dug in. Between them ran two hundred meters of no-man’s-land, a barren field scarred with shell holes, barbed wire, and mud. And despite artillery bombardments, ground attacks, and an escalating death toll, the Ypres battlefield remained a stalemate.
Max, a twenty-four-year-old Jewish German soldier, had arrived at the front six months earlier. Prior to entering the military, he had attended the Royal Conservatory of Music of Leipzig. A pianist and aspiring composer, he dreamed of someday performing at the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. But his ambition was placed on hold when war erupted in Europe. For Max and many other Jews, serving Germany created hope of being treated equal to non-Jewish Germans for the first time. However, Max was discouraged to learn that Jewish soldiers were limited in rank and could only become officers of the reserve, not the regular army. Regardless of his education and combat training performance, he was given the position of asoldat, the lowest rank of enlisted men in the army, and he was assigned to the front.
The initial weeks in the trenches were nearly intolerable for Max. The muddy, rat-infested conditions were abhorrent, spawning influenza, typhus, and trench foot. Artillery cannons perpetually boomed. The ground quaked. Shrapnel whistled through the air. He’d witnessed men, some of whom he’d befriended, die in battle. A looming sense of dread, knowing that he could be maimed or killed at any moment, haunted him like a shadow. Under a rain of shellfire, it was luck—not valor or skill—that determined who would live or die.
As weeks had turned to months, Max learned to accept that there was only so much he could do to influence his fate.Keep my head down,he’d told himself, crawling under a hail of machine gun fire. He hoped that he could endure six more months. After reaching his one-year anniversary on the front, he would receive a two-week leave, and he’d go home to his fiancée, Wilhelmina. He longed to see her and wrote to her often, but his deep-seated will to survive wasn’t solely driven by the hope of reuniting with her. It was fueled by the death of his parents, Franz and Katarina.
Max’s parents had perished in the sinking of theBaron Gautsch, a passenger ship that sank in the northern Adriatic Sea at the onset of the war, after running into a minefield laid by the Austro-Hungarian Navy. One hundred and twenty-seven passengers and crew members died in the sinking of the ship, and his parents’ bodies were never recovered. He prayed that they didn’t suffer. Heartbroken, he often viewed a photograph taken of him and his parents at a piano performance in Leipzig, which he kept in hissoldatenleather wallet, alongside a picture of Wilhelmina.Do I make you proud?he would often silently ask.Will I be forgiven for what I’m required to do?After closing his wallet, he would return to his duties, resolved to live another day, and another day after that.
Max sipped his soup to the squelching of footsteps approaching in the muddy trench.
“Disinfection Unit,” Jakob said, nudging Max.
Max looked up. A mustachedoberleutnantstopped and directed two soldiers following him. One of the soldiers used a wind gauge, which was attached to a pole and raised high in the air, while the other inspected a grouping of large, metal cylinders, partially buried in the base of the trench. The officer recorded notes on a clipboard. Their unit had routinely traversed the area, but the frequency of their inspections had increased over the past few days.
Max and his comrades lowered their spoons. Their meal conversation faded.
Otto, a stout soldier with a lantern jaw, called to the officer. “Is there anything we can do to help, sir?”
“Nein,” the officer said in a hoarse, bass voice. He scribbled on his paper.
Otto lowered his head.
Weeks ago, several thousand metal cylinders were installed along the trench lines by a special squad called the “Disinfection Unit.” The cylinders were buried—except for their tops—into the base of the trench, like giant iron carrots. Rubber hoses, attached to the cylinder valves, ran up and over the trench. At the end of the hoses were lead nozzles, which faced the enemy line. Although the handling of the cylinders was the responsibility of the Disinfection Unit, Max had come to the aid of a unit member who was struggling to lug a cylinder to a hole. The thigh-high cannister weighed nearly forty kilograms, Max estimated, and it appeared to contain some type of gas. Rumors about the cylinders spread through trenches, especially when a few, privileged officers were speculated to have received some type of breathing apparatus used for miners. But as days and weeks passed, the soldiers—who were toiling to stay alive—paid less and less attention to the idle cylinders.
The mustached officer recorded another wind reading, and then disappeared with his men down the trench.
“They work hard to keep their duties a secret,” said Heinrich, a wiry soldier from Cologne who loved to play cards.
“Maybe the cylinders contain disinfectant for lice,” Jakob said.
“I don’t think so,” Max said. “The nozzles are pointed toward the enemy, and they’re measuring the speed and direction of the wind.”
Jakob shrugged.
“Maybe the French have worse lice than us,” Otto said, grinning.
A few of the men chuckled, but the jesting abruptly faded.
Whatever is inside the cylinders cannot be good. Max stirred his soup, and he wished that the heavy spring rains would return, burying the cylinders and the entire western front under a river of mud.
Jakob finished his food and turned to Max. “Do you think the farmhouse that we visited on our leave has been destroyed by shellfire?”
“I don’t know,” Max said, surprised by his friend’s inquiry.
