Brothers at War

The brothers have been fighting and bickering since childhood. The older one was too stern and critical, the younger one too reckless and goading. “You boys used to be such buddies,” says their mother. “Before he became an asshole,” says the young one. “Before he became a total jackass,” says the older.

The too-serious older brother wanted passionately to enlist in the war effort, but was turned down for his asthma. But now his screw-up kid brother has gotten drafted. The older brother makes a deal with the local draft board officer and goes to war in his brother’s place. Yes, he wants to serve. But he also knows his brother would never survive the battlefield.

The screw-up, Alvie, discovers the deception a year or so later, when his brother, Benjamin, has become a P.O.W. Alvie reins in his goofing and anarchy to get hired as a buyer of foreign textiles. The job gives him entry to the war zone. In enemy-occupied European territory now, Alvie takes daring risks to learn the location of his brother’s POW camp. His well-honed ability to lie and finagle prove handy. But he makes mistakes. His impulsiveness and love of hi-jinx keeps getting the best of him. There’s no way this undisciplined daredevil will manage to pull off a war-time rescue.

*

We cut to the hell of prison camp. It’s a dark, filthy, underground perdition, a  swamp of sadism and desperation. Benjamin is ill and half-starved. A fellow prisoner stabs him in order to steal his food. This situation is hopeless.

*

Alvie has managed to seduce the girlfriend of an enemy officer. He uses her to get to the captain, intending to get some information out of him. But the tables turn. The captain has Alvie in a stranglehold. Alvie reaches the girlfriend’s pistol, turning the tables back. The captain reveals the needed information. Alvie realizes belatedly that he must kill this captain now. We see the sweetness drain from his face. This good-natured young man has crossed a boundary.

*

Benjamin captures and eats a cockroach. He’s hanging on. He’s waiting. A certain voice is heard, kind and reassuring—the prison physician. Benjamin rallies his strength, wrestles the doctor, knocks him out. He’s carefully plotted and waited for this. He strips the doctor of his clothing. But his fellow prisoner begs him, shows the rotting of his gangrenous hand: he needs this escape more urgently than Benjamin. Benjamin gives away what was probably his last hope.

*

Cut to Alvie, tormented by the murder he’s committed, drinking too much. He catches the eye of a stern-faced female combatant in her off-duty uniform. He seduces her, somehow charming in his drunkenness. We see them arriving at a bedroom. We watch her emerge from her dark war clothes, exposing the bright skin beneath. We see her features shedding the hardness of war. We hear the two of them shouting their brief release from pain.

*

Days of interrogation. Benjamin coughing up black muck. A week goes by. And perhaps another week. Perhaps a month. Time is hallucinogenic here. As weak and sick as Benjamin was before, he is sicker and weaker now. He can only crawl, and barely that. When the guards make him stand, he falls, splitting his head. Another wound. Another notch closer to his end.

“You will talk,” says the interrogator. “Believe me, I am nothing compared to the man you will meet tomorrow.” A final night in his cell. He croaks his goodbyes to the world, to his parents, to his brother. Tomorrow comes. The Interrogation Master arrives, the fearful personage Benjamin has been threatened with days. Benjamin is dumped in the inquisitional chair, strapped tightly across his raw, oozing wrists. His vision is blurry, his hearing muffled and ringing. He is almost past caring.

“Out of the room,” says a voice. “I wish to have my fun alone.” It’s just the two of them now.

“You might as well kill me,” Benjamin croaks. “I didn’t tell them, I’ll never tell you.”

“It’s almost over,” says the voice. “Bennie, it’s almost over.” The interrogator is Alvie. “I’m getting you out of here.”

It has taken him those extra, costly weeks to finish his planning. All the deals we saw him making, all the cryptic scheming and purchasing, has come to fruition. Alvie unlocks and expands his instrument cart. Lifts out of it a corpse. Arranges this body on the metal torture table. Dresses it in Benjamin’s putrid clothes. Puts a clean, white gown around his brother. Helps his brother into the hidden compartment under the cart’s workbench.

“We’re going home, Bennie.”

“You crazy jackass.”

A couple of dangers remain. Some luck is still needed. But this audacious, fearless clown pulls it off. We see him pass a quick wink to a harsh-faced female guard—the soldier whose beauty he looked for and found that one night. The brothers are in a truck, almost out of the camp, when Alvie rolls down the window to bark at a sentry, something in German. The sentry is befuddled, almost drops his rifle in his rush to salute. They truck drives on, Alvie laughing. He had to get in one more jest.

“You’re gonna mate with his mother?” Bennie says weakly.

“Is that what I said?” asks Alvie. “That son of a bitch at the bar.”

“Next time maybe a little more homework.”

“Next time maybe don’t get captured.”

“Fair enough.”

The brothers are now riding through friendly territory in the back of a farm truck, sprawled on sacks of grain, They’ve both become a bit more like the other, more like the contrasting but united friends they started out as.