Outlines of war

Before the war

The Saint Edouard Sanatorium, just outside Stoumant, a tiny Belgium village, was, not at all by choice, the bloody heart of intense fighting which raged through the region following Hitler's surprise offensive, the Allies biggest battle in Europe, the Battle of the Bulge.

The Sanatorium was home to old people, orphans, and sick people, and had somewhere in the area of 250 residents when the Kampfgruper Pieper and his crack SS troops came west in a roar across the Ardennes Forest. For three days amid the madness, the Sanatorium had been under the control of the Allies, then the Germans, then the Allies, then the Germans. Somehow, St. Edouard's 250 residents of had made it through the continual warfare by hiding out in the basement of the building, while the place was under never-ending bombardment. 

Pieper was no slouch. When the reinforcements he was promised never came, his situation became untenable. His early successes in the march to the Meuse had been were remarkable, but at the sanatorium he found himself cut off completely with nowhere to go but to withdraw back to a Nazi-occupied town just down the road. When he asked for permission, permission was denied. He was to stay until reinforcements arrived. Those reinforcements never came.

During the war

Major Hal McCown, who'd been captured earlier, talked with Pieper when Pieper was down to little more than 20 men. Things were not looking good for Pieper, and McCown wanted to get some sense of what was happening all around. Allied troops had been totally surprised by the sudden German offensive--by the sheer size of the Christmas operation.

McCown was somewhat taken with Pieper because despite Pieper's SS status, the man seemed human, not simply a tool of Hitler's madness. Pieper talked reasonably about plans for a unified Europe, a wonderful place with great opportunities and a standard of living unsurpassed in the world. He wasn't a devotee of der Fuhrer, but he liked the idea of a prosperous life for a modern Europe. 

But McCown was worried about the American prisoners of war. The massacre at Malmedy was writ starkly in his consciousness. He had to do everything in his power to keep them--and the 250 residents of the Sanatorium--alive, so he brought up the subject with Kampfgruper Pieper, and he did so by asking about the notorious treatment of prisoners by the Russians on the Eastern Front. 

Pieper told McCown that he'd like to take him to the Eastern Front so he could see for himself the barbarism that went on. "Then you'd see," he told McCown why we've had to violate all rules of warfare. The Russians have no idea what the Geneva Convention means."

Then he said something that felt to me at least uniquely prescient. "Someday perhaps you Americans will find out for yourselves. And you'll have to admit our behavior on the Western Front has been very correct."

Seems almost prophetic, doesn't it?--Pieper's prediction three-quarters of a century ago? Someday we too will come to understand how Russians do warfare.

Today, in Ukraine, we too have. Pieper was wrong about many things, but when I read that story I couldn't help but think that although it has taken as long as it did, today, for sure, we know much more about the abject brutality of Russian warfare.

Today