Dr. Feelgood by Richard A. Lertzman, William J. Birnes Read Free Book Online Page B

jailed prisoners. He recognized Max, heard his story of how he ran afoul of the police, and released him from prison.
    Max turned eighteen the following year and received his draft notice for the 65th Field Artillery Regiment in Deutsch-Aylau, a small city near the Russian Frontier. The war had been ravaging Europe for long enough that the populations in both Germany and in Russia were disaffected with their imperial leaders and disenchanted with any glory based on victory in war. As Max remembered it, Germany was demoralized, and the government was near collapse. Kaiser Wilhelm, the Hapsburg monarch who’d led the nation into war with Russia, Great Britain, and France, had fled to Holland as social unrest swept the country. In his place, the Germans had installed the Weimar Republic, a social democratic movement. For Max, this meant that by the time his basic army training was to have been completed, Germany would have already been defeated. But the war was still on, and Max still had to report to his draft board.
    Max’s mother did not want her son to go to the front. She had already lost one son to war. How ironic would it be, as all of Germany gradually collapsed and submitted to a bitter peace, for her son to be one of the final casualties of the war? She vowed she would not let this happen. Through the grapevine, Mrs. Jacobson heard that the district draft board director, a retired military officer of great stature and even greater pomposity, had an obsession for the nearly unobtainable Liederkranz cheese, so precious in ration-driven Germany that finding it was like finding gold. Max’s mother, the wife of a butcher who knew where items could be found at a price, managed to bargain for a piece of Liederkranz, wrapped and boxed it, and sent Max off to his local draft board with, as he described it, a big wooden box under his arm.
    The rumors about the draft board director of Max’s district were true. He was a crotchety old man, hobbled by wounds from prior wars, limping around his office and weighed down by a long cavalry saber that dragged across the floor. Under his bald crown, he stared hard at Max, a stare made even more menacing by the man’s thick walrus moustache. Max remembered that moustache challenging him as he entered the director’s office, a moustache that began to quiver ever so slightly as the director sniffed the air. Then he focused his glare at the box tucked under Max’s arm.
    His hard glare seemed to melt as he looked at the box. “And what can I do for you, young man?” he said.
    “I’m Max Jacobson,” Max said, announcing himself and continuing that he was following his orders to report for induction.
    “Very commendable,” the director said, staring longingly at the box under Max’s arm. He walked around the desk toward Max. “The Kaiser needs every man he can get at the Polish Front.”
    Max began his pitch. Though he had received his induction notice, he already had two brothers serving in the army, both of whom had suffered casualties. Max was the sole son left at home. Max also said tha the was working at the Pankow Hospital in Berlin, serving as a medical assistant in surgery. The shortage in medical personnel was acute, Max explained, which was why his duties in the operating room dealing with wounded combat veterans was so important. He would soon be entering medical school, Max said. And then he put the box of cheese right on the director’s desk.
    The district draft board director stared directly at the box on the desk, his moustache twitching as the aroma of cheese permeated the room. Then he said, “Well, what’s one man more or less at the Polish Front?” And Max left the office. He was not inducted.
    Max enrolled as a pre-med at the Fredrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where his first class was human anatomy, and was quickly overwhelmed by the huge volume of reading his professor piled on his desk. In fact, the stack of books was so tall that it obscured the