Eight Rounds, Part One
May. 12th, 2016 02:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
barefoot_bardTitle: Eight Rounds
Rating: M (Suitable for ages 16 and above)
Disclaimers: Names given in this story are fictional and any relation to actual persons, living or dead, is purely incidental. No profit is being made from this story.
Summary: An American paratrooper tries to survive the first night of the invasion of France. Normandy, June 1944.
Author's Note: Without a doubt, there are errors, historical or otherwise, in this piece. I apologise for them now.
Hitting the ground at last should have been a blessing, but the bone-jarring suddenness of the impact was anything but. I managed to roll after my boots hit the earth, just like I'd been trained, but I still felt as though I'd busted both my legs. The weight of gear I was carrying didn't help with that. Or with getting up again so I could get the parachute gathered in and the harness and Mae West off. Just as well it was dark, so nobody could see me flailing and flopping around like a demented turtle. The rattle of machine guns in the near-distance and the streams of tracers slashing upward into the sky, accompanied by the flashes and booming cracks of anti-aircraft fire offered me ample motivation to be as quick as I could manage. As I wrestled out of my harness, I looked upward. Both the decision and the timing were dubious. I saw something flare very brightly and there was a sound like a thunderclap as the yellow-orange ball spread outward into smaller comets of fire that streaked down to the earth.
That had been a plane. A plane carrying guys just like me. If they had been lucky, they'd have managed to jump before the plane was hit. If. My inner optimist was determined to believe they had. My inner realist was equally determined to believe otherwise. I satisfied them both with a quiet curse and finally succeeded in getting rid of the bright yellow life vest. That was a blessing beyond any doubt. I was much less visible without that thing on my chest. As I grabbed the bulky soft-sided case my rifle was in, I realised that not being visible was good and bad at the same time. The darkness was as much a protection as it was a danger. I could be shot just as surely by a buddy as by the enemy. Worse that that, I realised I had no idea where any of my buddies even were. We had been in too much of a hurry to get out of the plane to pay much attention to the ground we were jumping over.
I checked that I had a clip loaded and worked the slide to chamber a round. The clack of metal over metal seemed horribly loud to my ears, even though I told myself it'd be a miracle for anybody but me to actually have heard it over the racket of battle going on all around. Feeling very scared, very suddenly, I found the Garand's safety with my thumb and flicked it off. Those machine guns could hardly be more than a mile away. They weren't American guns either. Even I knew that. German troops were out there. Hell. They were all around me for all I knew. I hunkered down and stared into the dark, trying to decide if I should stay put or try to find the guys from my plane. The abrupt chatter of voices from closer to me than I thought to be safe made my mind up for me, because those weren't American voices. Without a second thought, I was on my feet and running. I had no idea where I was, what I was heading toward, or how long it would take before those Germans spotted me and opened fire. All I knew was that I'd landed smack-dab in the middle of enemy territory. And I was on my own.
The thick tangled barrier of a hedgerow between me and the two distinct German voices behind me was the only protection I had, once I got it between me and them. Not that I had any intention to stop running. Hell with that. There was safety in flight just then, or so I thought. If it wasn't for the ditch I ran straight into, I think I'd probably have made it halfway across France. I'd always been a runner. The awards I won for my high school track team are testimony of that. That ditch leapt out of nowhere, though, and literally swallowed me up. It was an irrigation ditch. I'd helped dig enough of them back home to recognise this one. Unlike the ditches back home, though, this one had bodies in the bottom of it. Warm, swearing, heavily-laden bodies.
"Jesus Christ," one of them snarled in an undertone.
A safety clicked and I felt the cold metal of a rifle muzzle press against the back of my head. "Flash," a gravelly voice hissed.
What was the countersign? I knew it. I did. In our briefings, they'd made sure we all knew what the challenge and countersign would be for the operation. The challenge was Flash and the countersign was -
"Thun - thunder!" I blurted out, the answer coming to me when I thought of the sound the C-47 high above had made when it exploded.
The rifle muzzle lifted away and I wilted, shaking now that the threat of immediate death was gone. My relief lasted only as long as it took for the man I'd landed on to fling an elbow up into my chest and with a gruff, "Get the fuck off me!" and thereby startle me back to the present. I couldn't moisten my throat enough to offer an apology so I rolled awkwardly off the trooper, though I knocked his helmet off as I got clear.
"Who the hell is that?"
"Reynolds," I gasped, trying to wriggle my way to an unoccupied patch of dirt. "PFC Reynolds, D Company."
"Jesus Christ." It was the first voice, sounding no less grumpy than before. So far, whoever it was did not seem to be capable of saying anything else.
A partially blackened face loomed out of the dark toward me. "What regiment?"
What the hell kind of question was that? "Five-Oh-Eighth," I replied, only then remembering to thumb my rifle's safety catch back on.
"Jesus Christ."
"God's sake, Kasp, shut up," somebody hissed.
The guy with the blackened face shook his head. "We're B Company, First of the the Five-Oh-Deuce. I'd say it was nice to meet you, but..."
Yeah. I knew what he meant. "You seen anybody else?"
"Nope. It's just us four. Plus you. Hope you brought your fightin' spirit 'cause we're goin' after that MG nest the next field over."
Jesus Christ, I thought. He had to mean the MG nest I'd heard after I landed. And he wanted to attack it with just the five of us? He was out of his damn mind. I stared at him in the dark and tried to get my head around what he wanted done. Five guys taking on an enemy machine gun emplacement when who knew how many other Germans were close enough nearby to wipe us off the map.
"You're crazy," I said.
"Yep," he said. He flashed me a grin that seemed unnaturally bright against his paint-smeared face. "You in?"
I wanted to say no. To tell him that he was out of his mind and his plan would get all of us killed. But I found myself nodding instead. His plan was crazy. It probably would get all of us killed. Staying put here in this ditch would get us killed too, though. Eventually. The Germans would sweep through the area when the sun came up and they'd find us, and however many other guys were nearby, and that'd be it. It had to be better to go out on the offensive. Right?
"Let's do it," I said.
He reached out to slap me on the shoulder. "Okay. Kinsley, you're on point. Farnham, you keep an eye out on our back-trail. Everybody else check your gear. Nothin' should make a noise. All good? Move out, boys."
Without a word between them, the 101st guys formed up in a single file and set off, creeping along the ditch for about fifteen yards before the pointman, Kinsley, cautiously poked his head up to survey our surroundings. He held up a closed fist and we all stopped, scarcely daring to breathe. There was a long pause during which Kinsley slithered up out of the ditch on his belly, as silent as a snake. What had he seen? What was he doing? My thumb edged toward my rifle's safety. Just in case, I told myself, as though I wasn't actually feeling the faintest tremor of mistrust. The rest of the file waited with straining ears until he reappeared, his head and one hand just visible above us. He gestured with the flat of his hand, and the rest of us clambered up out of the ditch, taking care to keep low. If even one of us was spotted, we'd all die. Of that I was both utterly terrified and utterly certain.
The machine gun was still in action, chattering away at something we couldn't see. We ran hard for the cover of the hedgerow that separated the fields. No infantryman likes being in the open. The hedgerow offered us some protection and we scuttled along in its shadow, eyes and ears alert for any sign of the enemy. Now that I was moving and with other paratroopers, I felt less nervous. If it'd been only me, I may not have left that ditch. I'm no coward but I'm not a go-getter like that, either. Letting somebody else take charge suits me fine, for sure. Even though I didn't even know the name of the guy who was in charge now, I realised. But maybe that was for the best? I wasn't enamoured of the idea that I'd be dying with friends, strange as that probably was.
Ahead, Kinsley abruptly stopped, flinging a hand into the air to signal the rest of us to halt. The rattling noise of the machine gun was much closer now and I thought I could hear the cleaner pops of rifle fire mixed in. Was that from our guys or nervous Germans shooting at shadows? The hedgerow and another field stood between us and finding out. At least I wouldn't be the first one to go round the towering barrier to find out. I sat back on my heels, looking briefly up at the lines of tracers as they stabbed across the sky. There were more planes up there, dumping more paratroopers out into this nightmare. It was hardly a comfort to realise we might not be alone for very much longer. A nudge from the guy behind me got me moving again and we crept forward, doing our best to avoid making too much noise. I kept my eyes in motion, sticking to my training as best I could. Stay alert, they'd told us over and over. Stay alert and stay alive.
The end of the hedgerow was close. I could hear German voices shouting what sounded like orders but it could have been encouragement or a long string of curses for all I knew. Not that it mattered. There were at least three different Germans somewhere on the other side of the hedgerow. They didn't know we were close by but they would as soon as we attacked. Up ahead, Kinsley's shadow was easing toward the open space of the hard-packed turn road that ran along the ends of the fields, his rifle tucked into his shoulder. The rest of us followed with our own weapons ready. I could hear the guy called Kasp muttering under his breath. His voice was pitched too low make out the words. He grimaced when he saw me glance back at him and he fell silent, apparently embarrassed to have been noticed. At a whispered warning from Kinsley, we all stopped again to watch him dash over the road and disappear into the shadows of an embankment on the opposite side.
If I hadn't seen where he'd gone, I couldn't have picked him out of the gloom. Whoever this guy was, he was damn good. The shouting voices seemed like they were getting closer. So did the rattle of rifle fire. I thought I heard an American voice start yelling but it was hard to be sure. That machine gun was still in action too and its constant chattering was making me nervous. How on Earth were we supposed to take that thing out with just five of us? It would rip us to shreds in seconds, once it got trained around. I clutched my rifle and hoped that nobody else could smell my fear. These might not be guys from my regiment or even my division but they were still paratroopers. I couldn't give them any cause to think I couldn't be relied on. I was a paratrooper too and I had to prove it.
The trooper with the painted face was tapping me on the shoulder, his voice rasping harshly in my ear. "You and Kasp are gonna cut around the end of this hedgerow, go about ten yards to the right, and give us coverin' fire. We're going straight across the road after Kinsley and come at 'em from the flank. Wait until three grenades go off before you open up. Got it?"
I swallowed and made myself nod. "Got it."
Without a further word, the trooper moved off, taking Farnham with him. They scampered across the road and, like Kinsley, disappeared into the embankment's shadow. There had to be a ditch on the far side of the road, I decided. It was the most reasonable explanation for the completeness of their concealment. I started to reach for my canteen, suddenly aware that I was parched, but Kasp gave me a nudge. Right. He was right. We had a job to do and I was wasting time. I felt the edge of the safety with my thumb and flicked it off. This time, I meant it. I was going to be pulling the trigger very soon. Hell. I was going to be trying to kill Germans very soon. Knowing that Kasp was right behind me, expecting me to keep moving, I willed myself to put one foot in front of the other. At the end of the hedgerow I paused to listen for anything that suggested immediate danger - as if the MG way across the field didn't count as 'immediate danger'.
Get moving, Reynolds, I told myself. Okay. Here we go. I drew in a steadying breath and moved, sliding as quickly as I could around the wide end of the hedgerow. In only a few seconds I was around it and dashing, bent half-over, along the shallow slope at the hedgerow's base. Ten yards and then I was throwing myself flat, only once I was down on my belly did I shuffle around so I could see the MG nest and the soldiers manning it. They had built themselves a strong position with sandbags and felled trees. The eye-searing light of muzzle flashes made it hard to get an accurate estimate of how many were actually there but I decided it could not matter. I planted my left elbow into the dirt and brought my rifle up tight into the pocket of my shoulder, pressing my cheek against the butt so I could get my sights adjusted. I'd shoot at a spot about four feet back from the MG's muzzle flashes. If all I could do was make the guy on the trigger keep his head down, that was still more than enough.
"Jesus Christ," I heard Kasp grunt from beside me. Was that really all he knew how to say?
I ignored him and tried to steady my breathing. Even in, even out. I wanted every shot to count. My finger was around the trigger and I was in a good position. We were just waiting on the others now. Hopefully they wouldn't take too long to signal the attack. Now that we were ready, I doubted I could muster up the gumption to try this again, should nothing happen. As it turned out, I was stupid to worry about it. Neither of us saw the grenades actually being thrown but the three explosions, so close together that they seemed to be one blast, sent one German flying and brought an immediate end to the MG's racket. The shouts from the MG nest now were of surprise and pain. I pulled the trigger, willing myself to think of nothing but aiming each shot as best I could. Beside me, Kasp was firing steadily, one round per breath, it seemed. The metallic ting of his empty clip ejecting itself from the rifle came almost a full minute before I was likewise compelled to reload.
The rumble of a .30 calibre machine gun from our left was so unexpected that I stopped shooting, lifting my gaze up from my target to see where that friendly gun team was. Only the incoming whizz of bullets over my head reminded me that the German MG crew were still alive. Kasp was already on his third clip, his second having tinged its way into the darkness behind us somewhere. I fired blindly, twice, before settling back into a proper shooting position. The instructors at Camp Mackall had made sure all of us knew how to shoot well. So I steadied my breathing, slipped my finger back around the trigger, and fired. Two rounds in and there was a ting as my empty clip spiralled upward. I shoved a hand underneath me to get at my ammo pouches for another one.
"Yeah! Get 'em!" Somebody shouted. "Push up, push up!"
That wasn't the trooper whose name I didn't know yet. It might be Farnham or Kinsley, maybe - but then I saw flickers of movement from the far side of the field, off to my right. Several man-shaped shadows were breaking away from the cover of a small shed to charge across the field itself, some of them shooting on the run. What in the hell was going on here?
Kasp lurched to his feet, slamming his fourth clip home even as he started to run forward. His departure was sudden enough that I nearly shot him through the legs as he crossed my line of fire. "Jesus Christ," I snapped, holding my fire until that lunatic was clear. He might be happy to run headlong at a still-lethal enemy but I was going to follow our original orders to provide covering fire. The .30 cal on the left was rattling away still and the German MG was back in action, firing in short, controlled bursts. Two more grenades blasted dirt and parts of a tree into the air. There was a ting as I fired the last bullet in my clip. A Thompson was spitting in its distinctive way and I heard somebody start screaming, amid the sharp barks of a pistol, probably employed as a last-ditch defence by one of the Germans.
I had just slapped the action forward and was ready to fire again when I realised that the night had gone quiet. The shooting had abruptly stopped and in place of all the noise, the silence seemed uncomfortable and alien. I kept my finger on the trigger as I listened for any sign that the Germans were about to make a counterattack, since surely they must have beaten off the mad charge against them. If that was so, I was absolutely a dead man. Which meant I had to get the hell out of there. I reached back and down for my bayonet, thinking that I would not go down quietly. Not now. Already, I was feeling like I'd happily take on the world if it meant a chance at surviving until dawn.
"Reynolds! Hey, you still out there?"
That was the voice of the trooper with the painted-up face. How in the hell had he made it through? More to the point, what was he doing? My ears tuned in then and I realised that other American voices were discernible. Shit. Had we won? I let go of my bayonet, leaving it sheathed for now, and got to my feet.
"Yeah, I'm here," I called back, warily starting across the field. If this was a trick, I was out of here like greased damn lightning. But it wasn't, as I discovered to my relief. There were six men gathered around the MG emplacement, busily attending to the clearing away of dead Germans. It looked like there were four of the latter and they were being carefully laid out some yads to the rear of the sandbags. A trooper with sergeant's stripes was leaning against the waist-high sandbag wall, one arm bound across his chest in what looked like a raincoat. Another soldier was kneeling beside the sandbags but I couldn't see what he was doing.
The guy with the arm in a sling turned toward me as he heard me getting closer. "So you're Reynolds," he said in a strained voice. He sized me up for a moment, then nodded. "McManus, Easy Company, Five-Oh-Second. We haven't seen any Eighty-Second guys but you're welcome to trail along with us until we get back to our regiment."
I stared at him for a moment. Everything in our briefings had said the 101st were jumping over objectives to the east of where the 82nd was supposed to be. But here were guys from two companies of the same regiment and none of them were 82nd men. It didn't make any sense. Had my plane strayed over the wrong DZ? I thought back to the hailstorm of AA fire and pea-soupy cloud banks we'd flown through. That was very possible, all things considered. It was no answer to the question of why I was the only 82nd guy anywhere around, which was something that was starting to really bother me.
"Sarge," I said, "where are we?"
He shrugged with one shoulder. His voice, when he spoke, was a soft Tennessee drawl. "Hell if I know. Normandy, somewhere. I have a map but it ain't worth a thing without a compass. Unless you have one of those handy?"
I shook my head. Compasses were something for officers to carry. A guy like me was only trusted with a rifle and a few grenades.
McManus shrugged again and tried unsucessfully to stifle a groan. "There's a farmhouse not far from here. We'll hunker down there until dawn. I saw some Germans dug in a couple miles off as we were coming down. Seems like they've got a pretty good presence around here. I don't much care to cross paths with them tonight."
Neither did I, but I didn't dare say so. "Is Jerry around the farmhouse too?"
"Shouldn't be. The place is dark as a pocket."
I bit down onto my tongue to keep from asking any other questions. He seemed to have a better idea of our surroundings and situation than I did, so I didn't want to let him think I didn't trust him. Even so, I looked skyward, where the deadly lightshow was still going on, and couldn't help saying, "I can't be the only one in my plane to make it down."
"It's pretty crazy up there. Guys have been dumped all over the place." Painted Face Guy loomed out of the dark in our direction. "I saw a plane going down in pieces a bit after we got over land."
That was something I didn't want to hear. Neither did McManus. The sergeant levered himself away from the sandbag wall and said "Let's roll, boys. We got another hundred yards or so to go and Jerry's still out there. Doc, how's Corbet doing?"
"He can walk and fight," said the soldier who'd been kneeling. He was back on his feet now, wiping his hands off on his trousers. Two other troopers were helping the man he'd been tending to, pulling him upright and slinging his arms across their shoulders. Everybody else was spreading out, ready to move out. I moved off to the left, recognising Kasp's outline and deciding that sticking with somebody familiar was better. Even if that somebody familiar apparently knew only two words.
"Stick with us, Reynolds," Painted Face Guy told me in a cheerful undertone. "We'll have you converting by time we rejoin the division."
"Yeah, like hell."
The other trooper grinned. "We'll see."
These guys knew their stuff. I'm no slouch at fieldcraft but these Screaming Eagles were damn sharp. We went over the road and down the opposite of the embankment, spread out in tactical column, every eye peeled for movement, every ear alert for voices or suspicious noises. Two troopers kept a close watch behind us, one of them carrying a Thompson. After the short fight to take out the MG nest, the half-hour it took to close on the darkened farmhouse was a complete letdown. Halts were made three times, but no threat sprang out of the night at us. It seemed impossible that we were the only Americans in the area but that was exactly how things were shaping up. Sergeant McManus signalled us into an encircling formation around the farmhouse, taking care to leave a healthy buffer between us and it. Two of his troopers swept through the nearest buildings and turned up nothing. There were no Germans anywhere on the grounds but they could be waiting for us in the farmhouse itself.
I kept an eye on the left flank, just able to see part of the house and the dirt driveway leading over a slight rise and around out of view past a hedgerow. To my surprise, Kasp and Kinsley approached the farmhouse itself, the aim of their rifles shifting from window to window as they hustled across open ground to the cover of the nearest wall. The farmhouse's front door was their object and they paused here, Kinsley standing just slightly to Kasp's left with his rifle trained squarely on the door. I could not watch them of course but I listened and when Kasp called out in fast, fluent German, I looked sharply in his direction. Whatever I had expected to happen, it certainly was not that! There was no answer to what he said, whatever it was he'd actually said. It seemed as though nobody was home. Kasp called out again, repeating his previous command. It had to be a command, since it had the sound of authority to my ear. Again there was nothing, whereupon he stepped forward and planted his foot solidly against the door.
The bang of his boot against wood seemed to echo for miles but the door didn't so much as budge. He tried again without success, then flung himself bodily against the door. He bounced off it as if he was made of springy rubber. Kinsley moved in to try his luck and met with failure too. The skinny paratrooper picked himself up out of the dirt and turned his attention to the window nearest the door, which he broke with a single blow from his rifle butt. In a moment, he was over the sill inside, with Kasp close behind him. There was no sign of activity until a pair of gunshots shattered the night. The shooting brought Sergeant McManus running across the yard, his M1911 in hand. Two other troopers were hard on his heels and a single shouted order from the sergeant brought the rest of us along too. Somebody inside the farmhouse was shouting - no, two people were shouting. One voice was American and the other was French. French? I reached the window Kinsley had broken and used my momentum to launch myself through it, scraping my belly hard over the thick sill. Broken glass stabbed into my left palm, which I'd used to give myself a balancing point on the sill itself, but I ignored the pain and the blood.
Kinsley was down, Kasp was standing over him with his Garand in his shoulder, and a small, white-haired Frenchman was squared off across the room, an old bolt-action rifle levelled on the two paratroopers. He was all but screaming at them both, at all of us, really, as we came crashing into the house around him. Somebody was hammering at the front door, which had been blocked by a stoutly built chest of drawers, but my focus was fixed on the Frenchman. He was the only danger to any of us, yet even with several weapons pointing at him, he seemed completely unafraid. Hell. Not only was he not scared, he was furious. I had not heard language like that in a long time. Since well before my grandfather had died, actually. It was almost embarrassing, because I could imagine him using these same words to express whatever his feeling of the moment was.
"Drop the gun!" I shouted in French, suddenly very glad Grand-dad had insisted on teaching all of us his native tongue. "We are American soldiers. Not Germans. Put the rifle down! Now!"
He stared at me, his eyes wide. "Of course you are Germans, this one speaks German. You've come back to steal from me again - "
"M'sieur, we're Americans. We aren't going to rob you. Put the rifle down."
The man offered up a couple choice words to express how much he believed me. It was probably a good thing that he could not see that Sergeant McManus had come into the farmhouse somehow and now stood behind the Frenchman, his pistol aimed at the back of the old man's head. "I don't what the hell you're saying to him, Trooper, but he has five seconds to put that gun down or I'm splatterin' his brains all over this room." This cold-blooded remark, offered in that gentle Tennessee drawl, made me shiver. I didn't want this guy to die, I realised suddenly. This guy had shot a paratrooper but he didn't deserve to get what McManus intended to give him.
"M'sieur," I said firmly, "look at our uniforms. We are not Germans. We've come to kill Germans, not pretend to be them. The soldier you've shot is American. Not German. If you don't put your gun down, you will be shot. Do you understand?"
He seemed to realise how many guns were pointing at him, for he looked around at each paratrooper in the room. His own rifle did not waver but after a long moment, he appeared to accept the situation. "Americans," he said, jerking back the bolt of his rifle to eject the unfired bullet in the chamber. He left the bolt open and held the gun up in front of him in both hands. A trooper stepped quickly forward to grab it away from him while another approached to search the man, none-too-gently.
"Reynolds," McManus said, his pistol still levelled at the Frenchman. "You speak his language so you're in charge of him. Get him upstairs and keep him quiet. Doc - "
"He's not hit bad, Sarge," the medic reported, already tending to Kinsley. "Bullet went cleanly through his arm."
"Lucky for him. Get him out of here, Reynolds."
"Yes, Sergeant." I slung my rifle from my shoulder and moved forward to take the old man's arm, changing easily to French to say, "Come upstairs with me, M'sieur. You're not a prisoner but we have to - " Have to what? Make sure he wasn't a threat to us? Keep him under guard until we were reinforced? "We have to protect ourselves," I finished, feeling lame and unconvincing.
He said nothing, leading the way up the stairs. The steps creaked gently under our feet and I realised, even in the dark, that the man was wearing heavy boots. An old pair of military boots, since the metallic scrape of hobnails on the boot soles could mean nothing else. The man's trousers were dark blue and were bloused over a pair of short gaiters. It was a uniform. Not one I recognised except of course that it was a uniform. We reached the top of the stairs and he turned right, going into a room that faced the staircase.
"Wait, M'sieur - " I hurried after him, suddenly worried he was going to get his hands on another gun, but on entering the room, I discovered that he had sat down on a narrow bed against one wall. That was harmless enough. I couldn't see any obvious weapons in the room, though this was clearly the old man's bedroom. There was a chair near the door and I pointed at it. "May I sit?"
"Yes," he said, sounding annoyed, but then he sighed. Then he looked at me properly. His eyes ran critically from my helmet to my boots, lingering on my face. "You're only a boy."
My cheeks warmed. I was twenty-two. Hardly too young to have joined up. "I'm old enough, M'sieur."
To my astonishment, he laughed. "All who are too young say that." He rose from the bed and crossed to the window, where he closed the heavy drapes with a swish. It was abruptly very dark in the room and my fingers were curling around the hilt of my sheathed bayonet when the man clicked a lighter to life. The little flame flickered and danced as he used it to light a candle, whereupon he closed the lighter with a metallic snick and shoved it back into his pocket. He lifted the candle so its glow illuminated a handful of framed photographs on the wall. I had to stand up and turn to see them. Two were of smiling young men, hardly older than me, wearing uniforms. One held a rifle loosely in his hands. I looked at their faces then at the shadowy wrinkles of the old man. There was definitely a resemblance. His point was obvious even to me. All who are too young say that.
"My sons," he said. His tone was strange. Not happy, but not sad either.
"They're soldiers?"
The man's voice hardened. "They're dead."
Oh. "I'm sorry, M'sieur."
"The Germans killed them," he went on, as I hadn't spoken. "Charles, in Hannut and Paul, in Lille. They were good boys who loved their country. They were too young but they said they were old enough. Like you, M'sieur."
I couldn't think of anything worth saying to that, so I said nothing. The old man didn't seem to notice. He gazed at the pictures in silence for another moment or two, then blew out the candle. The thick darkness didn't bother me this time. There was a rustle as the old man pulled the drapes open, only to drag them hastily shut again.
"Germans!" He hissed at me, and flung up a hand into my chest to stop me going to the window to look for myself. "A dozen men, a patrol," he told me.
I wanted desperately to look but I knew the man's instinct to prevent it was correct. The Germans would not expect to see an American face here. If they did, all hell would break loose. And the guys downstairs didn't know there was danger so close. I unslung my rifle and tried to sound confident. "Stay here, M'sieur. Leave this to us."
If I didn't convince myself, I sure as hell didn't convince him, but I hurried off toward the stairs without waiting for an answer. Sergeant McManus had not wasted a second of the time I'd been gone. All exits had been blocked by furniture, what furniture there was, and there was a sentry posted at a window on each side of the house. The medic had turned the living room into a makeshift aid station and the trooper named Corbet was resting as comfortably as possible against the wall nearest the stairs, his bandaged leg stretched out before him. The medic had laid out two aidbags near him and when I came rattling down the stairs, he was busy cutting up what looked like a tablecloth into long strips for bandages.
"Sergeant, there's a - "
"German patrol comin', we know." The one-armed sergeant was tightening up the straps on his webbing, appearing quite unconcerned. "Kinsley spotted them five minutes ago. Why aren't you guarding your prisoner?"
"He's not a prisoner, Sergeant. And he spotted the patrol too."
McManus grunted. "Kasprzak, Farnham. Get your thirty cal upstairs. Hose everybody down when I give the word." He pointed at me. "You go back upstairs and make sure our host doesn't alert the enemy that we're here. Be ready to open fire when the rest of us do."
There was nothing for it but to run back upstairs, two at a time. It was careless of me and probably dangerous but I was angry. I couldn't say why, either. The old man was sitting on his bed again, but he had another rifle in his hands now. I had no idea where it had come from or how he'd kept it and the other one hidden from the Germans. In my present mood, I didn't give a damn, either. Instead, I glanced at him, shrugged, and said, "I hope that's loaded, M'sieur. The sergeant is going to attack that patrol."
He stood up, holding the rifle like somebody who knew how to use one. Which, we'd already seen, he did. "He is an eager one. I like that."
From the next room over came the rattling scrape of something being dragged across the floor, followed by a dull thump as Kasprzak and Farnham got themselves set up. Kasprzak - that had to be Kasp, I thought. I drifted toward the window, ready to pull the drapes aside, or down, so I had a clear field of fire. The old man was working the bolt of his rifle, which looked like the one he'd used downstairs, even in the dark. How many of those did he have? If we lived through the night, I'd ask him. For now, I gripped my own rifle and tried to keep my quickening heartbeat from being too loud in the stillness of the room. There was no sound from downstairs or the next room. The whole house seemed to be tense, waiting for the shot or the order that would signal the springing of the ambush. I eased the safety off and pulled the rifle butt in tighter to my shoulder. Not seeing the enemy's position because of the covered window made me nervous. What if they were sizing up the farmhouse, dark and silent as it was, and were deploying themselves to surround it?
A single rife shot rang out, clear and crisp. That had to be it. I snatched at the drapes with my off hand, tugging them roughly aside. The next obstacle was the window itself, which I began to open, but the old man jabbed his rifle butt at the glass, shattering it. He reversed his weapon and was firing through the broken window before I could manage to get my own gun up from the low ready. His rifle was a bolt action but it was spitting out rounds as though it was self-loading like my Garand. Jesus he was quick. I squared up on his left side to give him space to work his gun's bolt unimpeded, lined up my rifle's sights on a running German, and pulled the trigger. In the next room, Farnham's .30 cal was in action, cutting down two enemy soldiers as they tried to sprint for the cover of an old truck in the yard. My shot had brought down my target and I shifted my aim to another, this one flinging his rifle up into his shoulder to return fire. Three bullets hit him, stitching a rough line from his left knee to his right shoulder, and he dropped like a stone.
Some of the Germans had taken cover in a stand of trees and were shooting back, but their muzzle flashes gave us something to aim at. Farnham's machine gun made short work of them, with ample help from a grenade somebody downstairs threw with brilliant accuracy. Two soldiers broke and ran. One of them, I saw as I fired at their backs, was carrying a radio. I brought my aim up in an attempt to hit the radio, but it was too difficult a target at this distance, and the man carrying it was running with all the speed of somebody fleeing for his life. I tried anyway and hit only a twisted old tree.
"Merde!" I said.
The firing faded away and there was silence again. That was until one of the Germans who'd been shot stirred, lifting a hand to reach for something on his webbing. The old man beside me was on him like a hawk sighting prey. He had fired twice, rapidly, before I was able to grasp what he was doing. By then, of course, it was much too late. The wounded German was dead, a pouch on his belt half-open. I grabbed at the Frenchman's rifle and tried to pull it out of his hands, but he was stronger than I expected. He resisted my grab, then, when I tried again, he lanced out a closed fist at my face. With both my hands occupied, I could not block the punch and it was swung too fast for me to dodge. It landed squarely on my left cheek and knocked me back against a bureau at the foot of the old man's bed. I let go of his rifle but kept my grip on mine, somehow, which allowed me to throw an answering punch of my own.
Heavy footfalls raced into the room and my attempt to deliver a second punch was blocked by an arm with the Screaming Eagle patch on it. "Jesus Christ!" The interloper exclaimed. It could only be Kasp.
"The hell's goin' on here?" More boots on the hardwood flooring heralded the arrival of others from downstairs. The voice spitting out the question belonged to Sergeant McManus. Two other troopers had come with him but McManus, slight a guy as he was, seemed to fill up the doorway with his air of indignant authority. I stepped backward, seeking distance from the Frenchman. What he'd done made me feel sick and it took me a moment to find my tongue to speak.
"He shot a wounded man, Sergeant."
McManus scowled at the Frenchman, then at me. "So?"
"So?" I stared at him. "That's against the Geneva Convention, Sergeant. It's a war crime."
"Fuck the Geneva Convention," retorted McManus. "You really think Jerry gives a shit about that? You shoulda come down where we did. There were two sticks in the air. All the guys from our plane. We drifted over a stand of trees and a bunch of guys got hung up in the branches. You know what Jerry did? Hosed us all down with a machine gun. We're the only guys made it clear. I was fifteen feet up but cut my risers anyway just to get down. The fall busted my arm but I'm still breathin'. So I ain't broken up about some Goddamn German being shot, wounded or not. It's the least any of 'em deserve."
I opened my mouth to argue the point, since I'd always been taught that two wrongs never made a right, but McManus jabbed a finger into my face. "Now I don't give half a shit if your pal here puts a bullet into every last Jerry bastard in France. Hell. He's welcome to it. You should be more worried about doin' your Goddamn job than about some archaic pissant law that nobody follows anyway. You got that?"
I said nothing. There was no point. At least not then. Instead, I pushed past McManus and the others who'd come upstairs after him. The atmosphere in that room was not one I liked and I'd be damned if I stayed a second longer in such bloodthirsty company. Hell, the atmosphere in this whole house was not one I wanted to stay in. I was a soldier not a murderer! One of McManus' troopers peered at me in surprise as I came clattering noisily down the stairs but he didn't get in my way, probably because of the expression on my face. He and his buddies watched as I headed for the door.
"Reynolds!"
The voice belonged to Sergeant McManus but I ignored him, planting my shoulder against the stout chest of drawers and forcing it aside with pure brute strength. Then, without a backward glance, I was gone, all but flinging the door off its hinges in order to get outside. That bastard could go pound sand as far as I was concerned. I had to find my unit and I wasn't doing that hanging around with the likes of him. So out into the night I went, making it several strides into the moonlit dooryard before pausing to look around. The dead Germans were off to my left, their bodies lying like shadowy lumps on the darker earth. We had approached the farm from that way, off to my right, and I knew that German patrol had come from the opposite direction. I didn't know what was out there around us but it could hardly do me harm to find out. Who knew, I might find my unit along the way. I hefted my rifle and set off, only too happy to leave the farm behind. Let McManus and his bunch stay here to wallow in slaughter. I was a paratrooper and I was going to find my company. The noise of battle far in the distance seemed to have slackened a little as I moved cautiously off into the darkness. Long drifting lines of tracer still arced back and forth across the sky and the distant rippling sound of anti-aircraft fire told me the planes were still coming. Guys were still leaping out of C-47s into the bullet-riddled sky. God willing, they'd all make it to the ground. I glanced up but saw nothing except the fantastic lightshow high above. Good luck, fellas.
A narrow, hedge-lined cow path meandered away toward the gloom of a partially sunken lane. I followed it, rifle butt in my shoulder and ears straining for any unusual or unnatural sound. The enemy had shown he was close by and I was in no hurry to run into him again now that I was on my own. I wasn't any good to my unit dead, after all. So I kept my pace slow and my senses alert. For roughly a mile I encountered no sign of anyone, enemy or friendly, until the sudden barking of a dog away to my right had me flinging myself down into the ditch at the roadside. Dogs meant people and out here people more than probably meant trouble. My thumb flicked against the Garand's safety and my finger curled around the trigger in the same heartbeat, even as I rolled myself partway up the side of the ditch, ready to poke my head and rifle up to fire. Which action was, I realised an instant later, heartily stupid. The madly barking dog was being shouted at by an annoyed-sounded German. Shit. Several annoyed-sounding Germans, actually. Wasn't that perfect. Me on my own once again facing a bunch of the enemy who, at least for the moment, had no idea I was nearby. That was a state of being I had to maintain at any cost. I eased my finger off the trigger a little and let myself slide as silently as I could down into the bottom of the ditch. I was kidding myself if I thought myself bold enough to make the first move anyway. Defending myself or following on someone else's lead in an attack was one thing. Firing the first shot was completely another. Despite myself, I grinned. Briefly. A coward I wasn't. That had, I thought, already been proven.
The matter was decided for me when the barking suddenly started getting closer. So did the Germans who had stopped trying to shut the Goddamn dog up. Shit. Oh shit. I eased the rifle butt tighter into my shoulder and had to remind myself not to put too much pressure on the trigger just yet. If there were only a few of them, I might get one or two before the element of surprise was lost and my chance to make a clean escape went with it. Or maybe I should just run for it and forget trying to spring any kind of ambush at all. I was down in a ditch after all and I knew from past experience how hard it was to get quickly out of ditches when something went wrong. I got my legs underneath me and dug in my toes, ready to spring up and over the edge of the ditch behind me. There was only one real problem with my intention to escape and that was the hedge that loomed over that side of the ditch. I grimaced in irritation at how quickly I had forgotten that very important thing. To hell with it. The dog was close enough now that I could feel its barking starting to rattle my eardrums. I curled my offhand around a grenade on my webbing. No matter how I did, I realised, taking out these too-curious Germans would make a lot of noise. I might as well make sure I got as many of them as I could before all hell broke loose. The pin tasted faintly like metallic dirt when I pulled it out of the grenade with my teeth and the faint ping of the safety lever as it spiralled away into the darkness was the cue I needed to start counting the seconds I had until the grenade would go off. Three... two... here goes the whole damn world, I thought as I flicked the grenade upward toward the now very-near Germans. The grenade had hardly left my hand before I was flinging myself facedown into the very bottom of the ditch, one hand over my helmet and the other clutching my rifle. The bang of the grenade's detonation came sooner than I expected but it was accompanied by the screams of at least one of the German soldiers on the road.
Up. Get up. Up up up. I couldn't wait to find out how many of them I'd gotten. So I didn't. I started firing before I'd even gotten fully upright in the ditch and my first two shots hit only dirt, but the next two or three found their marks in somebody's legs. These guys weren't green troopers like me, though. There was at least one of them who'd been out of the grenade's blast range and he was already shooting back at me. I felt a bullet whine past my head and instinctively twitched sideways. Another bullet tugged the sleeve of my jacket and I felt a third burn its way across the top of my left shoulder. Yep, perfect, I thought as with a discouraging ting the empty clip ejected itself from my rifle.
"Fuck it!" I couldn't waste time reloading. Not this close to an enemy I hadn't completely defeated. My only real saving grace was the fact that the surviving Germans had taken what cover they could on the opposite side of the road. I snatched another grenade from my webbing, pulled the pin, and gave it a flick in their general direction. Then I flung myself headlong into the hedge, only just able to grab my helmet when the tangle of branches pulled it off my head as I went through. The explosion of the grenade gave me a few precious seconds to catch my balance, jam my helmet back onto my head, and set off at a gallop across the field. They'd follow me. I had absolutely no doubt about that. The only thing I didn't know was how long it'd take before they did. Which meant I had to get as much distance between them and me as I could. So I ran. I covered the mile and some back to the farmhouse in no time, it felt like. That place was the only haven of safety anywhere around so I headed straight for it. Pride be damned. I wanted to live to see tomorrow and if that meant putting myself at the mercy of Sergeant McManus and his boys, so be it. Just let them still be here. Hell. Just somebody still be here. Even if that somebody was only that murderous old Frenchman. Most of the doors had been blocked, I knew. Except for the one I'd gone swanning out through earlier. But if McManus was smart, he'd have barricaded that one too. So, as before, I'd go in through a window. Or at least I'd try. I held my rifle overhead to signal that I was a friendly as I approached, still at a run, and hoped that the farmhouse was not empty. The window I'd entered through previously was now blocked though. I could see that even from across the yard. Great.
"Flash!" I called out, throwing myself against the farmhouse's sturdy exterior and immediately shoving a hand into a belt pouch for a fresh clip. It didn't matter who was inside if I couldn't fight and I sure couldn't fight with an unloaded rifle.
From the barricaded window not far from my head, a voice hissed the reply of "Thunder."
"Open up!"
"Shop's closed. Sorry, pal," replied the voice.
I slapped the bolt forward, chambering a round, and rolled my eyes. "Come on! I got some Jerries on my tail."
"You shoulda stayed put here." The voice belonged, I realised, to the trooper whose name I still didn't know. The one who'd covered his face with camofluage paint. "Sergeant says you're on your own now."
"Fuck him," I replied.
"I heard that, Trooper," snapped Sergeant McManus. Something heavy and wooden scraped over floorboards on the other side of the window and McManus' face loomed in the darkened opening, a pale, ghost-like scowling oval that made me grimace. "You had your chance at fighting it out with us. You chose to run off like some kinda cowboy. So you'll just have to stick it out on your own."
What a fucking jerk. "That's not fair, Sergeant."
"Ask me if I give a shit if it's fair," was his retort. "Take off and find your pals from the Eighty-deuce. We don't hold with guys from other - "
From about a quarter-mile off, a shot rang out. A German called out something that sounded like a warning. Then two more shots came and I heard the whine of a bullet as it passed too close, even where I was crouched against the house. Christ. The bastards had followed me. I'd led them straight here. I couldn't believe it. In the darkness, across this unfriendly terrain, that bunch of determined enemy soldiers had followed me. And now they'd found not only me, but also the 101st guys.
"Jesus Christ," I said in disbelief.
McManus swore, withdrew into the house. "Walters! Tell your MG boys to shift their position. I want them set up to hose down the dooryard in thirty seconds. Move!" A moment later, he was back. "You damned idiot. Didn't they teach you anything in training about moving across country?"
"As If I could have known - "
"Contact left!" Somebody else inside the house bellowed, amid the sudden flurry of rifle fire. It was close, much too close, to have been from the group which had followed me here. It came, I realised abruptly, from the direction the patrol from earlier had approached. Good Lord. We had two different attacks to fend off and barely a dozen paratroopers to do it with. Without waiting for the OK from McManus, I got to my feet and slung myself hastily over the window sill, glad that we'd shattered the glass earlier. McManus wasn't there anymore anyway. He was upstairs. I could hear his voice snapping out orders even through the ceiling. So much for keeping a low profile here, I thought.
The trooper with the painted-up face grinned at me, slapped my shoulder, and said, "Welcome back to the party, buddy. You bring the beer?"
"No but maybe they did," I replied, managing to force a grin of my own. "There's probably six of the guys coming up from across the field. I ambushed them by a sunken lane and got maybe three, about a mile off that way. Guess they're pissed off enough to make a fight of it."
"Let 'em," the trooper said cheerfully. "We got a good position here. We can hold 'em off for days easy enough. You better get upstairs to our Frenchman. He's all in a spin 'cause nobody can talk to him."
"And you'll stay up there this time," added Sergeant McManus in a harsh tone as he came clattering back down the stairs. "I won't have any man coming and going as he pleases at this outpost. We're Goddamn paratroopers here! Walters, block up that window again, damn it. Don't give those Jerry bastards an invitation straight in!"
Walters. At last. "You're Walters?"
The trooper grinned at me, hastily slinging his rifle so he could shove the bookcase back against the window. "Yep! Didn't you know that already?"
"No," I replied, this time grinning honestly even as I started toward the stairs. It was a strange thing to find funny given the circumstances, but I was still pretty tickled. Were it not for the rattle of the .30 cal from upstairs and the mixed noise of Garands and a Thompson, answering the incoming fire from the two converging German attacks, I might even have laughed. As it was, I grinned the whole way up the stairs to the second floor, where I discovered our scowling French host in the same room I'd last seen him in, busily firing away with his bolt-action rifle. He didn't spare me a glance or a word as I tramped into the room but as I joined him by the window, rifle in my shoulder, I thought I saw a faint twitch of his head that I decided to interpret as a nod of approval. Then I was pulling my trigger and any thought other than killing the enemy was driven straight from my mind.
Rating: M (Suitable for ages 16 and above)
Disclaimers: Names given in this story are fictional and any relation to actual persons, living or dead, is purely incidental. No profit is being made from this story.
Summary: An American paratrooper tries to survive the first night of the invasion of France. Normandy, June 1944.
Author's Note: Without a doubt, there are errors, historical or otherwise, in this piece. I apologise for them now.
Hitting the ground at last should have been a blessing, but the bone-jarring suddenness of the impact was anything but. I managed to roll after my boots hit the earth, just like I'd been trained, but I still felt as though I'd busted both my legs. The weight of gear I was carrying didn't help with that. Or with getting up again so I could get the parachute gathered in and the harness and Mae West off. Just as well it was dark, so nobody could see me flailing and flopping around like a demented turtle. The rattle of machine guns in the near-distance and the streams of tracers slashing upward into the sky, accompanied by the flashes and booming cracks of anti-aircraft fire offered me ample motivation to be as quick as I could manage. As I wrestled out of my harness, I looked upward. Both the decision and the timing were dubious. I saw something flare very brightly and there was a sound like a thunderclap as the yellow-orange ball spread outward into smaller comets of fire that streaked down to the earth.
That had been a plane. A plane carrying guys just like me. If they had been lucky, they'd have managed to jump before the plane was hit. If. My inner optimist was determined to believe they had. My inner realist was equally determined to believe otherwise. I satisfied them both with a quiet curse and finally succeeded in getting rid of the bright yellow life vest. That was a blessing beyond any doubt. I was much less visible without that thing on my chest. As I grabbed the bulky soft-sided case my rifle was in, I realised that not being visible was good and bad at the same time. The darkness was as much a protection as it was a danger. I could be shot just as surely by a buddy as by the enemy. Worse that that, I realised I had no idea where any of my buddies even were. We had been in too much of a hurry to get out of the plane to pay much attention to the ground we were jumping over.
I checked that I had a clip loaded and worked the slide to chamber a round. The clack of metal over metal seemed horribly loud to my ears, even though I told myself it'd be a miracle for anybody but me to actually have heard it over the racket of battle going on all around. Feeling very scared, very suddenly, I found the Garand's safety with my thumb and flicked it off. Those machine guns could hardly be more than a mile away. They weren't American guns either. Even I knew that. German troops were out there. Hell. They were all around me for all I knew. I hunkered down and stared into the dark, trying to decide if I should stay put or try to find the guys from my plane. The abrupt chatter of voices from closer to me than I thought to be safe made my mind up for me, because those weren't American voices. Without a second thought, I was on my feet and running. I had no idea where I was, what I was heading toward, or how long it would take before those Germans spotted me and opened fire. All I knew was that I'd landed smack-dab in the middle of enemy territory. And I was on my own.
The thick tangled barrier of a hedgerow between me and the two distinct German voices behind me was the only protection I had, once I got it between me and them. Not that I had any intention to stop running. Hell with that. There was safety in flight just then, or so I thought. If it wasn't for the ditch I ran straight into, I think I'd probably have made it halfway across France. I'd always been a runner. The awards I won for my high school track team are testimony of that. That ditch leapt out of nowhere, though, and literally swallowed me up. It was an irrigation ditch. I'd helped dig enough of them back home to recognise this one. Unlike the ditches back home, though, this one had bodies in the bottom of it. Warm, swearing, heavily-laden bodies.
"Jesus Christ," one of them snarled in an undertone.
A safety clicked and I felt the cold metal of a rifle muzzle press against the back of my head. "Flash," a gravelly voice hissed.
What was the countersign? I knew it. I did. In our briefings, they'd made sure we all knew what the challenge and countersign would be for the operation. The challenge was Flash and the countersign was -
"Thun - thunder!" I blurted out, the answer coming to me when I thought of the sound the C-47 high above had made when it exploded.
The rifle muzzle lifted away and I wilted, shaking now that the threat of immediate death was gone. My relief lasted only as long as it took for the man I'd landed on to fling an elbow up into my chest and with a gruff, "Get the fuck off me!" and thereby startle me back to the present. I couldn't moisten my throat enough to offer an apology so I rolled awkwardly off the trooper, though I knocked his helmet off as I got clear.
"Who the hell is that?"
"Reynolds," I gasped, trying to wriggle my way to an unoccupied patch of dirt. "PFC Reynolds, D Company."
"Jesus Christ." It was the first voice, sounding no less grumpy than before. So far, whoever it was did not seem to be capable of saying anything else.
A partially blackened face loomed out of the dark toward me. "What regiment?"
What the hell kind of question was that? "Five-Oh-Eighth," I replied, only then remembering to thumb my rifle's safety catch back on.
"Jesus Christ."
"God's sake, Kasp, shut up," somebody hissed.
The guy with the blackened face shook his head. "We're B Company, First of the the Five-Oh-Deuce. I'd say it was nice to meet you, but..."
Yeah. I knew what he meant. "You seen anybody else?"
"Nope. It's just us four. Plus you. Hope you brought your fightin' spirit 'cause we're goin' after that MG nest the next field over."
Jesus Christ, I thought. He had to mean the MG nest I'd heard after I landed. And he wanted to attack it with just the five of us? He was out of his damn mind. I stared at him in the dark and tried to get my head around what he wanted done. Five guys taking on an enemy machine gun emplacement when who knew how many other Germans were close enough nearby to wipe us off the map.
"You're crazy," I said.
"Yep," he said. He flashed me a grin that seemed unnaturally bright against his paint-smeared face. "You in?"
I wanted to say no. To tell him that he was out of his mind and his plan would get all of us killed. But I found myself nodding instead. His plan was crazy. It probably would get all of us killed. Staying put here in this ditch would get us killed too, though. Eventually. The Germans would sweep through the area when the sun came up and they'd find us, and however many other guys were nearby, and that'd be it. It had to be better to go out on the offensive. Right?
"Let's do it," I said.
He reached out to slap me on the shoulder. "Okay. Kinsley, you're on point. Farnham, you keep an eye out on our back-trail. Everybody else check your gear. Nothin' should make a noise. All good? Move out, boys."
Without a word between them, the 101st guys formed up in a single file and set off, creeping along the ditch for about fifteen yards before the pointman, Kinsley, cautiously poked his head up to survey our surroundings. He held up a closed fist and we all stopped, scarcely daring to breathe. There was a long pause during which Kinsley slithered up out of the ditch on his belly, as silent as a snake. What had he seen? What was he doing? My thumb edged toward my rifle's safety. Just in case, I told myself, as though I wasn't actually feeling the faintest tremor of mistrust. The rest of the file waited with straining ears until he reappeared, his head and one hand just visible above us. He gestured with the flat of his hand, and the rest of us clambered up out of the ditch, taking care to keep low. If even one of us was spotted, we'd all die. Of that I was both utterly terrified and utterly certain.
The machine gun was still in action, chattering away at something we couldn't see. We ran hard for the cover of the hedgerow that separated the fields. No infantryman likes being in the open. The hedgerow offered us some protection and we scuttled along in its shadow, eyes and ears alert for any sign of the enemy. Now that I was moving and with other paratroopers, I felt less nervous. If it'd been only me, I may not have left that ditch. I'm no coward but I'm not a go-getter like that, either. Letting somebody else take charge suits me fine, for sure. Even though I didn't even know the name of the guy who was in charge now, I realised. But maybe that was for the best? I wasn't enamoured of the idea that I'd be dying with friends, strange as that probably was.
Ahead, Kinsley abruptly stopped, flinging a hand into the air to signal the rest of us to halt. The rattling noise of the machine gun was much closer now and I thought I could hear the cleaner pops of rifle fire mixed in. Was that from our guys or nervous Germans shooting at shadows? The hedgerow and another field stood between us and finding out. At least I wouldn't be the first one to go round the towering barrier to find out. I sat back on my heels, looking briefly up at the lines of tracers as they stabbed across the sky. There were more planes up there, dumping more paratroopers out into this nightmare. It was hardly a comfort to realise we might not be alone for very much longer. A nudge from the guy behind me got me moving again and we crept forward, doing our best to avoid making too much noise. I kept my eyes in motion, sticking to my training as best I could. Stay alert, they'd told us over and over. Stay alert and stay alive.
The end of the hedgerow was close. I could hear German voices shouting what sounded like orders but it could have been encouragement or a long string of curses for all I knew. Not that it mattered. There were at least three different Germans somewhere on the other side of the hedgerow. They didn't know we were close by but they would as soon as we attacked. Up ahead, Kinsley's shadow was easing toward the open space of the hard-packed turn road that ran along the ends of the fields, his rifle tucked into his shoulder. The rest of us followed with our own weapons ready. I could hear the guy called Kasp muttering under his breath. His voice was pitched too low make out the words. He grimaced when he saw me glance back at him and he fell silent, apparently embarrassed to have been noticed. At a whispered warning from Kinsley, we all stopped again to watch him dash over the road and disappear into the shadows of an embankment on the opposite side.
If I hadn't seen where he'd gone, I couldn't have picked him out of the gloom. Whoever this guy was, he was damn good. The shouting voices seemed like they were getting closer. So did the rattle of rifle fire. I thought I heard an American voice start yelling but it was hard to be sure. That machine gun was still in action too and its constant chattering was making me nervous. How on Earth were we supposed to take that thing out with just five of us? It would rip us to shreds in seconds, once it got trained around. I clutched my rifle and hoped that nobody else could smell my fear. These might not be guys from my regiment or even my division but they were still paratroopers. I couldn't give them any cause to think I couldn't be relied on. I was a paratrooper too and I had to prove it.
The trooper with the painted face was tapping me on the shoulder, his voice rasping harshly in my ear. "You and Kasp are gonna cut around the end of this hedgerow, go about ten yards to the right, and give us coverin' fire. We're going straight across the road after Kinsley and come at 'em from the flank. Wait until three grenades go off before you open up. Got it?"
I swallowed and made myself nod. "Got it."
Without a further word, the trooper moved off, taking Farnham with him. They scampered across the road and, like Kinsley, disappeared into the embankment's shadow. There had to be a ditch on the far side of the road, I decided. It was the most reasonable explanation for the completeness of their concealment. I started to reach for my canteen, suddenly aware that I was parched, but Kasp gave me a nudge. Right. He was right. We had a job to do and I was wasting time. I felt the edge of the safety with my thumb and flicked it off. This time, I meant it. I was going to be pulling the trigger very soon. Hell. I was going to be trying to kill Germans very soon. Knowing that Kasp was right behind me, expecting me to keep moving, I willed myself to put one foot in front of the other. At the end of the hedgerow I paused to listen for anything that suggested immediate danger - as if the MG way across the field didn't count as 'immediate danger'.
Get moving, Reynolds, I told myself. Okay. Here we go. I drew in a steadying breath and moved, sliding as quickly as I could around the wide end of the hedgerow. In only a few seconds I was around it and dashing, bent half-over, along the shallow slope at the hedgerow's base. Ten yards and then I was throwing myself flat, only once I was down on my belly did I shuffle around so I could see the MG nest and the soldiers manning it. They had built themselves a strong position with sandbags and felled trees. The eye-searing light of muzzle flashes made it hard to get an accurate estimate of how many were actually there but I decided it could not matter. I planted my left elbow into the dirt and brought my rifle up tight into the pocket of my shoulder, pressing my cheek against the butt so I could get my sights adjusted. I'd shoot at a spot about four feet back from the MG's muzzle flashes. If all I could do was make the guy on the trigger keep his head down, that was still more than enough.
"Jesus Christ," I heard Kasp grunt from beside me. Was that really all he knew how to say?
I ignored him and tried to steady my breathing. Even in, even out. I wanted every shot to count. My finger was around the trigger and I was in a good position. We were just waiting on the others now. Hopefully they wouldn't take too long to signal the attack. Now that we were ready, I doubted I could muster up the gumption to try this again, should nothing happen. As it turned out, I was stupid to worry about it. Neither of us saw the grenades actually being thrown but the three explosions, so close together that they seemed to be one blast, sent one German flying and brought an immediate end to the MG's racket. The shouts from the MG nest now were of surprise and pain. I pulled the trigger, willing myself to think of nothing but aiming each shot as best I could. Beside me, Kasp was firing steadily, one round per breath, it seemed. The metallic ting of his empty clip ejecting itself from the rifle came almost a full minute before I was likewise compelled to reload.
The rumble of a .30 calibre machine gun from our left was so unexpected that I stopped shooting, lifting my gaze up from my target to see where that friendly gun team was. Only the incoming whizz of bullets over my head reminded me that the German MG crew were still alive. Kasp was already on his third clip, his second having tinged its way into the darkness behind us somewhere. I fired blindly, twice, before settling back into a proper shooting position. The instructors at Camp Mackall had made sure all of us knew how to shoot well. So I steadied my breathing, slipped my finger back around the trigger, and fired. Two rounds in and there was a ting as my empty clip spiralled upward. I shoved a hand underneath me to get at my ammo pouches for another one.
"Yeah! Get 'em!" Somebody shouted. "Push up, push up!"
That wasn't the trooper whose name I didn't know yet. It might be Farnham or Kinsley, maybe - but then I saw flickers of movement from the far side of the field, off to my right. Several man-shaped shadows were breaking away from the cover of a small shed to charge across the field itself, some of them shooting on the run. What in the hell was going on here?
Kasp lurched to his feet, slamming his fourth clip home even as he started to run forward. His departure was sudden enough that I nearly shot him through the legs as he crossed my line of fire. "Jesus Christ," I snapped, holding my fire until that lunatic was clear. He might be happy to run headlong at a still-lethal enemy but I was going to follow our original orders to provide covering fire. The .30 cal on the left was rattling away still and the German MG was back in action, firing in short, controlled bursts. Two more grenades blasted dirt and parts of a tree into the air. There was a ting as I fired the last bullet in my clip. A Thompson was spitting in its distinctive way and I heard somebody start screaming, amid the sharp barks of a pistol, probably employed as a last-ditch defence by one of the Germans.
I had just slapped the action forward and was ready to fire again when I realised that the night had gone quiet. The shooting had abruptly stopped and in place of all the noise, the silence seemed uncomfortable and alien. I kept my finger on the trigger as I listened for any sign that the Germans were about to make a counterattack, since surely they must have beaten off the mad charge against them. If that was so, I was absolutely a dead man. Which meant I had to get the hell out of there. I reached back and down for my bayonet, thinking that I would not go down quietly. Not now. Already, I was feeling like I'd happily take on the world if it meant a chance at surviving until dawn.
"Reynolds! Hey, you still out there?"
That was the voice of the trooper with the painted-up face. How in the hell had he made it through? More to the point, what was he doing? My ears tuned in then and I realised that other American voices were discernible. Shit. Had we won? I let go of my bayonet, leaving it sheathed for now, and got to my feet.
"Yeah, I'm here," I called back, warily starting across the field. If this was a trick, I was out of here like greased damn lightning. But it wasn't, as I discovered to my relief. There were six men gathered around the MG emplacement, busily attending to the clearing away of dead Germans. It looked like there were four of the latter and they were being carefully laid out some yads to the rear of the sandbags. A trooper with sergeant's stripes was leaning against the waist-high sandbag wall, one arm bound across his chest in what looked like a raincoat. Another soldier was kneeling beside the sandbags but I couldn't see what he was doing.
The guy with the arm in a sling turned toward me as he heard me getting closer. "So you're Reynolds," he said in a strained voice. He sized me up for a moment, then nodded. "McManus, Easy Company, Five-Oh-Second. We haven't seen any Eighty-Second guys but you're welcome to trail along with us until we get back to our regiment."
I stared at him for a moment. Everything in our briefings had said the 101st were jumping over objectives to the east of where the 82nd was supposed to be. But here were guys from two companies of the same regiment and none of them were 82nd men. It didn't make any sense. Had my plane strayed over the wrong DZ? I thought back to the hailstorm of AA fire and pea-soupy cloud banks we'd flown through. That was very possible, all things considered. It was no answer to the question of why I was the only 82nd guy anywhere around, which was something that was starting to really bother me.
"Sarge," I said, "where are we?"
He shrugged with one shoulder. His voice, when he spoke, was a soft Tennessee drawl. "Hell if I know. Normandy, somewhere. I have a map but it ain't worth a thing without a compass. Unless you have one of those handy?"
I shook my head. Compasses were something for officers to carry. A guy like me was only trusted with a rifle and a few grenades.
McManus shrugged again and tried unsucessfully to stifle a groan. "There's a farmhouse not far from here. We'll hunker down there until dawn. I saw some Germans dug in a couple miles off as we were coming down. Seems like they've got a pretty good presence around here. I don't much care to cross paths with them tonight."
Neither did I, but I didn't dare say so. "Is Jerry around the farmhouse too?"
"Shouldn't be. The place is dark as a pocket."
I bit down onto my tongue to keep from asking any other questions. He seemed to have a better idea of our surroundings and situation than I did, so I didn't want to let him think I didn't trust him. Even so, I looked skyward, where the deadly lightshow was still going on, and couldn't help saying, "I can't be the only one in my plane to make it down."
"It's pretty crazy up there. Guys have been dumped all over the place." Painted Face Guy loomed out of the dark in our direction. "I saw a plane going down in pieces a bit after we got over land."
That was something I didn't want to hear. Neither did McManus. The sergeant levered himself away from the sandbag wall and said "Let's roll, boys. We got another hundred yards or so to go and Jerry's still out there. Doc, how's Corbet doing?"
"He can walk and fight," said the soldier who'd been kneeling. He was back on his feet now, wiping his hands off on his trousers. Two other troopers were helping the man he'd been tending to, pulling him upright and slinging his arms across their shoulders. Everybody else was spreading out, ready to move out. I moved off to the left, recognising Kasp's outline and deciding that sticking with somebody familiar was better. Even if that somebody familiar apparently knew only two words.
"Stick with us, Reynolds," Painted Face Guy told me in a cheerful undertone. "We'll have you converting by time we rejoin the division."
"Yeah, like hell."
The other trooper grinned. "We'll see."
These guys knew their stuff. I'm no slouch at fieldcraft but these Screaming Eagles were damn sharp. We went over the road and down the opposite of the embankment, spread out in tactical column, every eye peeled for movement, every ear alert for voices or suspicious noises. Two troopers kept a close watch behind us, one of them carrying a Thompson. After the short fight to take out the MG nest, the half-hour it took to close on the darkened farmhouse was a complete letdown. Halts were made three times, but no threat sprang out of the night at us. It seemed impossible that we were the only Americans in the area but that was exactly how things were shaping up. Sergeant McManus signalled us into an encircling formation around the farmhouse, taking care to leave a healthy buffer between us and it. Two of his troopers swept through the nearest buildings and turned up nothing. There were no Germans anywhere on the grounds but they could be waiting for us in the farmhouse itself.
I kept an eye on the left flank, just able to see part of the house and the dirt driveway leading over a slight rise and around out of view past a hedgerow. To my surprise, Kasp and Kinsley approached the farmhouse itself, the aim of their rifles shifting from window to window as they hustled across open ground to the cover of the nearest wall. The farmhouse's front door was their object and they paused here, Kinsley standing just slightly to Kasp's left with his rifle trained squarely on the door. I could not watch them of course but I listened and when Kasp called out in fast, fluent German, I looked sharply in his direction. Whatever I had expected to happen, it certainly was not that! There was no answer to what he said, whatever it was he'd actually said. It seemed as though nobody was home. Kasp called out again, repeating his previous command. It had to be a command, since it had the sound of authority to my ear. Again there was nothing, whereupon he stepped forward and planted his foot solidly against the door.
The bang of his boot against wood seemed to echo for miles but the door didn't so much as budge. He tried again without success, then flung himself bodily against the door. He bounced off it as if he was made of springy rubber. Kinsley moved in to try his luck and met with failure too. The skinny paratrooper picked himself up out of the dirt and turned his attention to the window nearest the door, which he broke with a single blow from his rifle butt. In a moment, he was over the sill inside, with Kasp close behind him. There was no sign of activity until a pair of gunshots shattered the night. The shooting brought Sergeant McManus running across the yard, his M1911 in hand. Two other troopers were hard on his heels and a single shouted order from the sergeant brought the rest of us along too. Somebody inside the farmhouse was shouting - no, two people were shouting. One voice was American and the other was French. French? I reached the window Kinsley had broken and used my momentum to launch myself through it, scraping my belly hard over the thick sill. Broken glass stabbed into my left palm, which I'd used to give myself a balancing point on the sill itself, but I ignored the pain and the blood.
Kinsley was down, Kasp was standing over him with his Garand in his shoulder, and a small, white-haired Frenchman was squared off across the room, an old bolt-action rifle levelled on the two paratroopers. He was all but screaming at them both, at all of us, really, as we came crashing into the house around him. Somebody was hammering at the front door, which had been blocked by a stoutly built chest of drawers, but my focus was fixed on the Frenchman. He was the only danger to any of us, yet even with several weapons pointing at him, he seemed completely unafraid. Hell. Not only was he not scared, he was furious. I had not heard language like that in a long time. Since well before my grandfather had died, actually. It was almost embarrassing, because I could imagine him using these same words to express whatever his feeling of the moment was.
"Drop the gun!" I shouted in French, suddenly very glad Grand-dad had insisted on teaching all of us his native tongue. "We are American soldiers. Not Germans. Put the rifle down! Now!"
He stared at me, his eyes wide. "Of course you are Germans, this one speaks German. You've come back to steal from me again - "
"M'sieur, we're Americans. We aren't going to rob you. Put the rifle down."
The man offered up a couple choice words to express how much he believed me. It was probably a good thing that he could not see that Sergeant McManus had come into the farmhouse somehow and now stood behind the Frenchman, his pistol aimed at the back of the old man's head. "I don't what the hell you're saying to him, Trooper, but he has five seconds to put that gun down or I'm splatterin' his brains all over this room." This cold-blooded remark, offered in that gentle Tennessee drawl, made me shiver. I didn't want this guy to die, I realised suddenly. This guy had shot a paratrooper but he didn't deserve to get what McManus intended to give him.
"M'sieur," I said firmly, "look at our uniforms. We are not Germans. We've come to kill Germans, not pretend to be them. The soldier you've shot is American. Not German. If you don't put your gun down, you will be shot. Do you understand?"
He seemed to realise how many guns were pointing at him, for he looked around at each paratrooper in the room. His own rifle did not waver but after a long moment, he appeared to accept the situation. "Americans," he said, jerking back the bolt of his rifle to eject the unfired bullet in the chamber. He left the bolt open and held the gun up in front of him in both hands. A trooper stepped quickly forward to grab it away from him while another approached to search the man, none-too-gently.
"Reynolds," McManus said, his pistol still levelled at the Frenchman. "You speak his language so you're in charge of him. Get him upstairs and keep him quiet. Doc - "
"He's not hit bad, Sarge," the medic reported, already tending to Kinsley. "Bullet went cleanly through his arm."
"Lucky for him. Get him out of here, Reynolds."
"Yes, Sergeant." I slung my rifle from my shoulder and moved forward to take the old man's arm, changing easily to French to say, "Come upstairs with me, M'sieur. You're not a prisoner but we have to - " Have to what? Make sure he wasn't a threat to us? Keep him under guard until we were reinforced? "We have to protect ourselves," I finished, feeling lame and unconvincing.
He said nothing, leading the way up the stairs. The steps creaked gently under our feet and I realised, even in the dark, that the man was wearing heavy boots. An old pair of military boots, since the metallic scrape of hobnails on the boot soles could mean nothing else. The man's trousers were dark blue and were bloused over a pair of short gaiters. It was a uniform. Not one I recognised except of course that it was a uniform. We reached the top of the stairs and he turned right, going into a room that faced the staircase.
"Wait, M'sieur - " I hurried after him, suddenly worried he was going to get his hands on another gun, but on entering the room, I discovered that he had sat down on a narrow bed against one wall. That was harmless enough. I couldn't see any obvious weapons in the room, though this was clearly the old man's bedroom. There was a chair near the door and I pointed at it. "May I sit?"
"Yes," he said, sounding annoyed, but then he sighed. Then he looked at me properly. His eyes ran critically from my helmet to my boots, lingering on my face. "You're only a boy."
My cheeks warmed. I was twenty-two. Hardly too young to have joined up. "I'm old enough, M'sieur."
To my astonishment, he laughed. "All who are too young say that." He rose from the bed and crossed to the window, where he closed the heavy drapes with a swish. It was abruptly very dark in the room and my fingers were curling around the hilt of my sheathed bayonet when the man clicked a lighter to life. The little flame flickered and danced as he used it to light a candle, whereupon he closed the lighter with a metallic snick and shoved it back into his pocket. He lifted the candle so its glow illuminated a handful of framed photographs on the wall. I had to stand up and turn to see them. Two were of smiling young men, hardly older than me, wearing uniforms. One held a rifle loosely in his hands. I looked at their faces then at the shadowy wrinkles of the old man. There was definitely a resemblance. His point was obvious even to me. All who are too young say that.
"My sons," he said. His tone was strange. Not happy, but not sad either.
"They're soldiers?"
The man's voice hardened. "They're dead."
Oh. "I'm sorry, M'sieur."
"The Germans killed them," he went on, as I hadn't spoken. "Charles, in Hannut and Paul, in Lille. They were good boys who loved their country. They were too young but they said they were old enough. Like you, M'sieur."
I couldn't think of anything worth saying to that, so I said nothing. The old man didn't seem to notice. He gazed at the pictures in silence for another moment or two, then blew out the candle. The thick darkness didn't bother me this time. There was a rustle as the old man pulled the drapes open, only to drag them hastily shut again.
"Germans!" He hissed at me, and flung up a hand into my chest to stop me going to the window to look for myself. "A dozen men, a patrol," he told me.
I wanted desperately to look but I knew the man's instinct to prevent it was correct. The Germans would not expect to see an American face here. If they did, all hell would break loose. And the guys downstairs didn't know there was danger so close. I unslung my rifle and tried to sound confident. "Stay here, M'sieur. Leave this to us."
If I didn't convince myself, I sure as hell didn't convince him, but I hurried off toward the stairs without waiting for an answer. Sergeant McManus had not wasted a second of the time I'd been gone. All exits had been blocked by furniture, what furniture there was, and there was a sentry posted at a window on each side of the house. The medic had turned the living room into a makeshift aid station and the trooper named Corbet was resting as comfortably as possible against the wall nearest the stairs, his bandaged leg stretched out before him. The medic had laid out two aidbags near him and when I came rattling down the stairs, he was busy cutting up what looked like a tablecloth into long strips for bandages.
"Sergeant, there's a - "
"German patrol comin', we know." The one-armed sergeant was tightening up the straps on his webbing, appearing quite unconcerned. "Kinsley spotted them five minutes ago. Why aren't you guarding your prisoner?"
"He's not a prisoner, Sergeant. And he spotted the patrol too."
McManus grunted. "Kasprzak, Farnham. Get your thirty cal upstairs. Hose everybody down when I give the word." He pointed at me. "You go back upstairs and make sure our host doesn't alert the enemy that we're here. Be ready to open fire when the rest of us do."
There was nothing for it but to run back upstairs, two at a time. It was careless of me and probably dangerous but I was angry. I couldn't say why, either. The old man was sitting on his bed again, but he had another rifle in his hands now. I had no idea where it had come from or how he'd kept it and the other one hidden from the Germans. In my present mood, I didn't give a damn, either. Instead, I glanced at him, shrugged, and said, "I hope that's loaded, M'sieur. The sergeant is going to attack that patrol."
He stood up, holding the rifle like somebody who knew how to use one. Which, we'd already seen, he did. "He is an eager one. I like that."
From the next room over came the rattling scrape of something being dragged across the floor, followed by a dull thump as Kasprzak and Farnham got themselves set up. Kasprzak - that had to be Kasp, I thought. I drifted toward the window, ready to pull the drapes aside, or down, so I had a clear field of fire. The old man was working the bolt of his rifle, which looked like the one he'd used downstairs, even in the dark. How many of those did he have? If we lived through the night, I'd ask him. For now, I gripped my own rifle and tried to keep my quickening heartbeat from being too loud in the stillness of the room. There was no sound from downstairs or the next room. The whole house seemed to be tense, waiting for the shot or the order that would signal the springing of the ambush. I eased the safety off and pulled the rifle butt in tighter to my shoulder. Not seeing the enemy's position because of the covered window made me nervous. What if they were sizing up the farmhouse, dark and silent as it was, and were deploying themselves to surround it?
A single rife shot rang out, clear and crisp. That had to be it. I snatched at the drapes with my off hand, tugging them roughly aside. The next obstacle was the window itself, which I began to open, but the old man jabbed his rifle butt at the glass, shattering it. He reversed his weapon and was firing through the broken window before I could manage to get my own gun up from the low ready. His rifle was a bolt action but it was spitting out rounds as though it was self-loading like my Garand. Jesus he was quick. I squared up on his left side to give him space to work his gun's bolt unimpeded, lined up my rifle's sights on a running German, and pulled the trigger. In the next room, Farnham's .30 cal was in action, cutting down two enemy soldiers as they tried to sprint for the cover of an old truck in the yard. My shot had brought down my target and I shifted my aim to another, this one flinging his rifle up into his shoulder to return fire. Three bullets hit him, stitching a rough line from his left knee to his right shoulder, and he dropped like a stone.
Some of the Germans had taken cover in a stand of trees and were shooting back, but their muzzle flashes gave us something to aim at. Farnham's machine gun made short work of them, with ample help from a grenade somebody downstairs threw with brilliant accuracy. Two soldiers broke and ran. One of them, I saw as I fired at their backs, was carrying a radio. I brought my aim up in an attempt to hit the radio, but it was too difficult a target at this distance, and the man carrying it was running with all the speed of somebody fleeing for his life. I tried anyway and hit only a twisted old tree.
"Merde!" I said.
The firing faded away and there was silence again. That was until one of the Germans who'd been shot stirred, lifting a hand to reach for something on his webbing. The old man beside me was on him like a hawk sighting prey. He had fired twice, rapidly, before I was able to grasp what he was doing. By then, of course, it was much too late. The wounded German was dead, a pouch on his belt half-open. I grabbed at the Frenchman's rifle and tried to pull it out of his hands, but he was stronger than I expected. He resisted my grab, then, when I tried again, he lanced out a closed fist at my face. With both my hands occupied, I could not block the punch and it was swung too fast for me to dodge. It landed squarely on my left cheek and knocked me back against a bureau at the foot of the old man's bed. I let go of his rifle but kept my grip on mine, somehow, which allowed me to throw an answering punch of my own.
Heavy footfalls raced into the room and my attempt to deliver a second punch was blocked by an arm with the Screaming Eagle patch on it. "Jesus Christ!" The interloper exclaimed. It could only be Kasp.
"The hell's goin' on here?" More boots on the hardwood flooring heralded the arrival of others from downstairs. The voice spitting out the question belonged to Sergeant McManus. Two other troopers had come with him but McManus, slight a guy as he was, seemed to fill up the doorway with his air of indignant authority. I stepped backward, seeking distance from the Frenchman. What he'd done made me feel sick and it took me a moment to find my tongue to speak.
"He shot a wounded man, Sergeant."
McManus scowled at the Frenchman, then at me. "So?"
"So?" I stared at him. "That's against the Geneva Convention, Sergeant. It's a war crime."
"Fuck the Geneva Convention," retorted McManus. "You really think Jerry gives a shit about that? You shoulda come down where we did. There were two sticks in the air. All the guys from our plane. We drifted over a stand of trees and a bunch of guys got hung up in the branches. You know what Jerry did? Hosed us all down with a machine gun. We're the only guys made it clear. I was fifteen feet up but cut my risers anyway just to get down. The fall busted my arm but I'm still breathin'. So I ain't broken up about some Goddamn German being shot, wounded or not. It's the least any of 'em deserve."
I opened my mouth to argue the point, since I'd always been taught that two wrongs never made a right, but McManus jabbed a finger into my face. "Now I don't give half a shit if your pal here puts a bullet into every last Jerry bastard in France. Hell. He's welcome to it. You should be more worried about doin' your Goddamn job than about some archaic pissant law that nobody follows anyway. You got that?"
I said nothing. There was no point. At least not then. Instead, I pushed past McManus and the others who'd come upstairs after him. The atmosphere in that room was not one I liked and I'd be damned if I stayed a second longer in such bloodthirsty company. Hell, the atmosphere in this whole house was not one I wanted to stay in. I was a soldier not a murderer! One of McManus' troopers peered at me in surprise as I came clattering noisily down the stairs but he didn't get in my way, probably because of the expression on my face. He and his buddies watched as I headed for the door.
"Reynolds!"
The voice belonged to Sergeant McManus but I ignored him, planting my shoulder against the stout chest of drawers and forcing it aside with pure brute strength. Then, without a backward glance, I was gone, all but flinging the door off its hinges in order to get outside. That bastard could go pound sand as far as I was concerned. I had to find my unit and I wasn't doing that hanging around with the likes of him. So out into the night I went, making it several strides into the moonlit dooryard before pausing to look around. The dead Germans were off to my left, their bodies lying like shadowy lumps on the darker earth. We had approached the farm from that way, off to my right, and I knew that German patrol had come from the opposite direction. I didn't know what was out there around us but it could hardly do me harm to find out. Who knew, I might find my unit along the way. I hefted my rifle and set off, only too happy to leave the farm behind. Let McManus and his bunch stay here to wallow in slaughter. I was a paratrooper and I was going to find my company. The noise of battle far in the distance seemed to have slackened a little as I moved cautiously off into the darkness. Long drifting lines of tracer still arced back and forth across the sky and the distant rippling sound of anti-aircraft fire told me the planes were still coming. Guys were still leaping out of C-47s into the bullet-riddled sky. God willing, they'd all make it to the ground. I glanced up but saw nothing except the fantastic lightshow high above. Good luck, fellas.
A narrow, hedge-lined cow path meandered away toward the gloom of a partially sunken lane. I followed it, rifle butt in my shoulder and ears straining for any unusual or unnatural sound. The enemy had shown he was close by and I was in no hurry to run into him again now that I was on my own. I wasn't any good to my unit dead, after all. So I kept my pace slow and my senses alert. For roughly a mile I encountered no sign of anyone, enemy or friendly, until the sudden barking of a dog away to my right had me flinging myself down into the ditch at the roadside. Dogs meant people and out here people more than probably meant trouble. My thumb flicked against the Garand's safety and my finger curled around the trigger in the same heartbeat, even as I rolled myself partway up the side of the ditch, ready to poke my head and rifle up to fire. Which action was, I realised an instant later, heartily stupid. The madly barking dog was being shouted at by an annoyed-sounded German. Shit. Several annoyed-sounding Germans, actually. Wasn't that perfect. Me on my own once again facing a bunch of the enemy who, at least for the moment, had no idea I was nearby. That was a state of being I had to maintain at any cost. I eased my finger off the trigger a little and let myself slide as silently as I could down into the bottom of the ditch. I was kidding myself if I thought myself bold enough to make the first move anyway. Defending myself or following on someone else's lead in an attack was one thing. Firing the first shot was completely another. Despite myself, I grinned. Briefly. A coward I wasn't. That had, I thought, already been proven.
The matter was decided for me when the barking suddenly started getting closer. So did the Germans who had stopped trying to shut the Goddamn dog up. Shit. Oh shit. I eased the rifle butt tighter into my shoulder and had to remind myself not to put too much pressure on the trigger just yet. If there were only a few of them, I might get one or two before the element of surprise was lost and my chance to make a clean escape went with it. Or maybe I should just run for it and forget trying to spring any kind of ambush at all. I was down in a ditch after all and I knew from past experience how hard it was to get quickly out of ditches when something went wrong. I got my legs underneath me and dug in my toes, ready to spring up and over the edge of the ditch behind me. There was only one real problem with my intention to escape and that was the hedge that loomed over that side of the ditch. I grimaced in irritation at how quickly I had forgotten that very important thing. To hell with it. The dog was close enough now that I could feel its barking starting to rattle my eardrums. I curled my offhand around a grenade on my webbing. No matter how I did, I realised, taking out these too-curious Germans would make a lot of noise. I might as well make sure I got as many of them as I could before all hell broke loose. The pin tasted faintly like metallic dirt when I pulled it out of the grenade with my teeth and the faint ping of the safety lever as it spiralled away into the darkness was the cue I needed to start counting the seconds I had until the grenade would go off. Three... two... here goes the whole damn world, I thought as I flicked the grenade upward toward the now very-near Germans. The grenade had hardly left my hand before I was flinging myself facedown into the very bottom of the ditch, one hand over my helmet and the other clutching my rifle. The bang of the grenade's detonation came sooner than I expected but it was accompanied by the screams of at least one of the German soldiers on the road.
Up. Get up. Up up up. I couldn't wait to find out how many of them I'd gotten. So I didn't. I started firing before I'd even gotten fully upright in the ditch and my first two shots hit only dirt, but the next two or three found their marks in somebody's legs. These guys weren't green troopers like me, though. There was at least one of them who'd been out of the grenade's blast range and he was already shooting back at me. I felt a bullet whine past my head and instinctively twitched sideways. Another bullet tugged the sleeve of my jacket and I felt a third burn its way across the top of my left shoulder. Yep, perfect, I thought as with a discouraging ting the empty clip ejected itself from my rifle.
"Fuck it!" I couldn't waste time reloading. Not this close to an enemy I hadn't completely defeated. My only real saving grace was the fact that the surviving Germans had taken what cover they could on the opposite side of the road. I snatched another grenade from my webbing, pulled the pin, and gave it a flick in their general direction. Then I flung myself headlong into the hedge, only just able to grab my helmet when the tangle of branches pulled it off my head as I went through. The explosion of the grenade gave me a few precious seconds to catch my balance, jam my helmet back onto my head, and set off at a gallop across the field. They'd follow me. I had absolutely no doubt about that. The only thing I didn't know was how long it'd take before they did. Which meant I had to get as much distance between them and me as I could. So I ran. I covered the mile and some back to the farmhouse in no time, it felt like. That place was the only haven of safety anywhere around so I headed straight for it. Pride be damned. I wanted to live to see tomorrow and if that meant putting myself at the mercy of Sergeant McManus and his boys, so be it. Just let them still be here. Hell. Just somebody still be here. Even if that somebody was only that murderous old Frenchman. Most of the doors had been blocked, I knew. Except for the one I'd gone swanning out through earlier. But if McManus was smart, he'd have barricaded that one too. So, as before, I'd go in through a window. Or at least I'd try. I held my rifle overhead to signal that I was a friendly as I approached, still at a run, and hoped that the farmhouse was not empty. The window I'd entered through previously was now blocked though. I could see that even from across the yard. Great.
"Flash!" I called out, throwing myself against the farmhouse's sturdy exterior and immediately shoving a hand into a belt pouch for a fresh clip. It didn't matter who was inside if I couldn't fight and I sure couldn't fight with an unloaded rifle.
From the barricaded window not far from my head, a voice hissed the reply of "Thunder."
"Open up!"
"Shop's closed. Sorry, pal," replied the voice.
I slapped the bolt forward, chambering a round, and rolled my eyes. "Come on! I got some Jerries on my tail."
"You shoulda stayed put here." The voice belonged, I realised, to the trooper whose name I still didn't know. The one who'd covered his face with camofluage paint. "Sergeant says you're on your own now."
"Fuck him," I replied.
"I heard that, Trooper," snapped Sergeant McManus. Something heavy and wooden scraped over floorboards on the other side of the window and McManus' face loomed in the darkened opening, a pale, ghost-like scowling oval that made me grimace. "You had your chance at fighting it out with us. You chose to run off like some kinda cowboy. So you'll just have to stick it out on your own."
What a fucking jerk. "That's not fair, Sergeant."
"Ask me if I give a shit if it's fair," was his retort. "Take off and find your pals from the Eighty-deuce. We don't hold with guys from other - "
From about a quarter-mile off, a shot rang out. A German called out something that sounded like a warning. Then two more shots came and I heard the whine of a bullet as it passed too close, even where I was crouched against the house. Christ. The bastards had followed me. I'd led them straight here. I couldn't believe it. In the darkness, across this unfriendly terrain, that bunch of determined enemy soldiers had followed me. And now they'd found not only me, but also the 101st guys.
"Jesus Christ," I said in disbelief.
McManus swore, withdrew into the house. "Walters! Tell your MG boys to shift their position. I want them set up to hose down the dooryard in thirty seconds. Move!" A moment later, he was back. "You damned idiot. Didn't they teach you anything in training about moving across country?"
"As If I could have known - "
"Contact left!" Somebody else inside the house bellowed, amid the sudden flurry of rifle fire. It was close, much too close, to have been from the group which had followed me here. It came, I realised abruptly, from the direction the patrol from earlier had approached. Good Lord. We had two different attacks to fend off and barely a dozen paratroopers to do it with. Without waiting for the OK from McManus, I got to my feet and slung myself hastily over the window sill, glad that we'd shattered the glass earlier. McManus wasn't there anymore anyway. He was upstairs. I could hear his voice snapping out orders even through the ceiling. So much for keeping a low profile here, I thought.
The trooper with the painted-up face grinned at me, slapped my shoulder, and said, "Welcome back to the party, buddy. You bring the beer?"
"No but maybe they did," I replied, managing to force a grin of my own. "There's probably six of the guys coming up from across the field. I ambushed them by a sunken lane and got maybe three, about a mile off that way. Guess they're pissed off enough to make a fight of it."
"Let 'em," the trooper said cheerfully. "We got a good position here. We can hold 'em off for days easy enough. You better get upstairs to our Frenchman. He's all in a spin 'cause nobody can talk to him."
"And you'll stay up there this time," added Sergeant McManus in a harsh tone as he came clattering back down the stairs. "I won't have any man coming and going as he pleases at this outpost. We're Goddamn paratroopers here! Walters, block up that window again, damn it. Don't give those Jerry bastards an invitation straight in!"
Walters. At last. "You're Walters?"
The trooper grinned at me, hastily slinging his rifle so he could shove the bookcase back against the window. "Yep! Didn't you know that already?"
"No," I replied, this time grinning honestly even as I started toward the stairs. It was a strange thing to find funny given the circumstances, but I was still pretty tickled. Were it not for the rattle of the .30 cal from upstairs and the mixed noise of Garands and a Thompson, answering the incoming fire from the two converging German attacks, I might even have laughed. As it was, I grinned the whole way up the stairs to the second floor, where I discovered our scowling French host in the same room I'd last seen him in, busily firing away with his bolt-action rifle. He didn't spare me a glance or a word as I tramped into the room but as I joined him by the window, rifle in my shoulder, I thought I saw a faint twitch of his head that I decided to interpret as a nod of approval. Then I was pulling my trigger and any thought other than killing the enemy was driven straight from my mind.