Himmler's War-ARC (17 page)

That evening, Magda showed Margarete a piece of paper that had just arrived by mail. Magda was clearly unhappy.

“We have been drafted,” she said.

Margarete at first thought it was a joke. “Where?” she laughed. “Into the Luftwaffe? I’ve always wanted to be a pilot.”

“No, you silly child, into one of the labor battalions that are being organized to develop defenses along the Rhine. All eligible German civilians between fourteen and sixty, male and female, are to participate, according to Himmler and Speer. Since we are not the farm’s owners or laborers, we are eligible. We will be trucked to the appropriate areas on Friday mornings and be returned on Saturday night so we can spend the Sabbath either praying for Germany’s success or salving our sore muscles.”

Bertha huffed. “You’d think that having a husband as a high-ranking officer in the OKW would be enough to exempt you.”

Magda declined to tell her sister that Ernst wasn’t all that high ranking and that he most likely wouldn’t permit special favors even if he had the power Bertha thought he had. She did wonder if the policeman who’d scolded her for protesting the deaths of the Jews had found out who she was and had been behind the conscription notice. No matter. She would serve the Reich.

Margarete understood Aunt Bertha’s dismay and shared it, but only to a point. Working to defend Germany would be an adventure and might help erase the lingering memory of those dead and rotting Jews. She stepped outside, away from bickering adults, and into a clear refreshing night filled with stars. She stiffened. Victor was slouching against a fence and staring at her. His hand reached down and briefly touched his crotch. She gasped and he walked away. She thought about telling Bertha, but what had she actually seen? Perhaps it was nothing more than a middle-aged man scratching himself.

Besides, she told herself, the farm needed men like Victor to work it. She would ignore the vulgar creature.

CHAPTER 8

LOOKING DOWN, Morgan thought the Seine resembled a twisting winding blue-gray ribbon. It began in the Alps, flowed to Paris, and from there north past Rouen and on to Le Havre, where it entered the English Channel. Even from a distance, the gouges in the earth on the eastern side betrayed the location of enemy positions.

“They just don’t give a shit if we see them or not,” Jeb Carter said. At Jack’s suggestion, several other officers had begun riding as copilot with him. It gave them an opportunity to see what he and his little plane could see and do and, equally important, not see and do. Several officers had found the Piper’s capabilities and limitations to be real eye openers. Snyder, his normal copilot didn’t mind at all staying on the ground where it was safer.

“You gonna get closer, Jack?”

“Nope. Just ’cause I look crazy doesn’t mean I am. We already know that a ton of antitank and antiaircraft guns are dug in there, so there’s no reason to push our luck just to prove it.”

To emphasize the statement, a few black puffs of flak erupted to their front. Jack turned the Piper to the north. They would turn back to base in a moment. “Warning shot,” he said. “They’re saying don’t piss us off by getting nosy and we won’t shoot at you either.”

“Sounds fair,” said Carter. He pulled a pack of letters from his jacket pocket, glanced at them and put them back.

“Your girlfriend?”

“She’s my cousin, and more important, a really good friend. So don’t give me any crappy comments about being surprised that I have relatives who can write. Literacy is not all that unusual in Georgia.”

“It ever crossed my mind. Is she married?”

“Naw, she’s single, cute, and actually she’s from up north in Pennsylvania. I’ve forgiven her for being a northerner. She’s here in France working on some Red Cross project trying to reunite refugee families.”

“Christ, that’ll keep her busy for centuries. Did you say she was cute and here in France?”

“Yes to both, although she’s always putting herself down about her looks. Doesn’t think she’s as pretty as she is. We’ve been friends since we were little kids.”

Jeb recalled a time when he’d thought she was both beautiful and desirable. After they’d both had a few illegal drinks, he’d managed to get her blouse and bra off before she’d stopped him and he’d never done anything like that to her again. Nor had they ever spoken of it, although he had a hard time forgetting just how lovely her breasts were. She had been seventeen and he’d just turned twenty.

Jeb pulled a couple of pictures from the envelopes and handed them to Jack. A young lady smiled at the camera. She was sitting on the ground and wearing shorts. Her legs were tucked underneath her and she had a bottle of Coke in her hand. Other people were in the area. It looked like a family picnic. A second picture showed the same woman playing tennis. Jack thought she had a great figure and outstanding legs. She was laughing and he wanted to laugh with her.

“Perhaps you can introduce me? Maybe you can arrange a blind date?”

Jeb Carter roared with laughter. “Sure thing, Jack-off. There’s nothing easier than arranging a blind date in the middle of a continent at war. I’ll call Ike and have him set up dinner and a movie. Maybe you can get Ike’s girlfriend as a chauffeur.”

Actually Jack thought the idea sounded great. But when did people start calling him Jack-off? Wasn’t Bomber Morgan bad enough? Damn Carter. And who the hell was Ike’s girlfriend?

       * * *

Monique Fleury was a local Rennes woman in her mid-thirties. Plump, wide-eyed and still pretty, and, most important, she spoke fluent English. She’d found work with the Red Cross where her ability to translate the patois of the area into something Jessica could understand was helpful beyond words.

Monique said her husband was somewhere under German control. That is, if he was alive at all. When he’d first been taken prisoner in 1940, she said she’d gotten a terse postcard allegedly signed by him saying that all was well. The prearranged signal that all was not well was contained in the fact that he’d misspelled his own first name. He was an officer, which meant that the Nazis would be even more loath to release him as they had done with some enlisted men. Rumors said that the Nazis had massacred all the French officers. Monique thought it was likely, and said that this left her with a small child who had never seen his father. He was being cared for by an elderly aunt while Monique went to work.

At the sound of shouts and screams, the two women rushed outside. A local gendarme was herding six distraught young women in their late teens and early twenties, and only half protecting them from a larger group of outraged and mainly older village women. The six younger women had been stripped to their underwear, were bruised about the head and shoulders, and their hair had been roughly hacked or shaved off. Blood from cuts and slashes was beginning to scab on their scalps. Their faces were bruised, apparently from being punched. The young women might have been pretty once, but the looks of terror, the bruises, and the blood denied that.

“Whores!” women in the crowd screamed and chanted, shoveling and jostling the six. The gendarme pushed one villager aside when it looked like she was going to hit one of the prisoners with an umbrella. Slaps and kicks were all right, but no umbrellas. A hand reached out and tore at a woman’s slip, exposing her breasts to the jeers of the crowd. The gendarme shrugged and grinned.

“Collaborators, aren’t they?” Jessica asked.

“They slept with the German soldiers and now they pay for it. The losers always pay, don’t they?”

Jessica hadn’t quite thought of it that way. “Why would they ever want to sleep with the Germans?”

Monique shrugged. “For the young ones, perhaps it was for love and adventure. There were very few young men left here thanks to the war, so a German soldier might have seemed attractive to a lonely young woman. After all, hadn’t the Germans won? And weren’t they going to be in charge here for a thousand years? For others, perhaps they screwed for the food that the German soldier had access to. There was never enough food provided by the Vichy government. Who knows? Maybe they really are whores and they did it for the money. Regardless, their side lost and they must now pay for being on the wrong side.”

Monique spat on the ground to emphasize her point. One of the young women had fallen and the crowd began kicking and jabbing at her while she crawled on bloody knees. It reminded Jessica of a scene from the Crucifixion. But these were French women condemned of whoring with the enemy, not Jesus.

“But this is awful.”

“Don’t judge. What do you think will happen to me if the Boche come back and the villagers suddenly decide that the Germans are their saviors?”

Jessica blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Jessica, I have a little boy and what I make working with you isn’t enough. Meanwhile there are vast mountains of supplies that well-meaning and helpful American soldiers can get to those willing to pay the old fashioned price.”

Jessica was shocked. “What are you telling me, Monique?”

“I have an American master sergeant who takes care of me and my son. I found him a couple of days after the Americans arrived. His name is Boyle and he has a wife and two children back in Oklahoma, wherever that is, but I’m here and she’s not.”

“And when your husband comes back?”

“Don’t you mean if? I haven’t heard from him in three years. I don’t think he’s alive and, if he is and does return, we will work it out. I will do what I need to for my child, and my husband will understand that or he will move on.”

“Did you ever sleep with a German for food?” Jessica asked, not quite wanting to hear the answer.

“I was never that hungry, although I came close on a few occasions.” She shook her head sadly. “I did have sex with the grocer a few times, though. He’s an old man and, except for him, it wasn’t very satisfying, but my son and I did have food.”

The mob had pushed the six women towards the city limits. “Now what will happen to them?” Jessica asked.

“They will be turned loose outside the city to fend for themselves.”

“How?”

Monique laughed. “Well, they are whores, aren’t they?”

* * *

Below the slow-flying Piper Cub, a German rear guard detachment was pulling out after once more stalling and mauling the 74th’s advance. The key position had been a two-story stone farmhouse. Artillery called in by Morgan had eventually obliterated it. The French had built well, and it had taken numerous hits before the burning roof had collapsed on the defenders.

A small column of German vehicles, several towing antitank guns, had then quickly limbered up and moved down the dirt road towards the west and the safety of another prepared position. They left behind two more burning Sherman tanks, along with dead and wounded crewmen. The continuing insolence and the success of the Germans infuriated the Americans and there had been a couple more incidents where Nazi prisoners had been shot. Morgan couldn’t blame the men on the ground. Like the sniper, it was hard to let a man who’d just shot and killed your friends get away with it by saying, “I surrender and would like now to go to a camp where I’ll be fed and warm while you go and try not to get killed by my buddies.”

Prisoner shooting, he concluded was an ugly but understandable fact of war, and one of those things nobody ever talked about.

Jack had called in artillery fire that had, as usual, missed the fleeing column by a wide margin. He’d then been informed that, as usual, no fighter-bombers were in the area. He’d sworn at the Germans’ good luck, and been willing to let the krauts depart until a machine gun in the tail-end truck opened fire on him, spitting a column of tracers in the air.

“Captain, that silly bastard’s shooting at us.”

“I can tell, Snyder.” He banked and twisted the Cub until the German gave up.

Enough of this shit, he thought. The tail vehicle was a Horch heavy all-terrain standard personnel vehicle. This one looked like it carried half a dozen German soldiers and was towing an antitank gun, although not one of the hated 88’s.

As he drew closer, the machine gun erupted again, but the Cub’s agility enabled Jack to evade the stream of bullets.

“Sir, what the hell are you doing?” Snyder yelled as Jack dropped even lower and lined up behind the Horch.

“I’m pissed off, Snyder.”

“Aw shit, Captain.”

“I had this little plane armed for a reason and this is it. Hang on.”

He dropped the plane to mere feet above the road, closing at more than twenty miles an hour faster than the big truck. Again, he juked and jigged while the gunner, in the front of the truck, futilely tried to swivel and find him.

At two hundred yards, he pulled the trigger and the twin thirties erupted, hitting the ground behind the Horch. He walked the bullets up to the truck and raked it. The truck swerved off the road and rolled down a ditch. Several men tumbled out and ran off. Jack was elated to see that not all the Germans had left the truck. He was about to make a second pass when the truck’s gas tank exploded. The other German vehicles had halted to protect their comrade and began to shoot at him. Jack decided it was time to go home.

“Jesus, sir, that was one helluva trick. Do me a favor though, and please don’t do it again. Mama Snyder wants me back home again.”

“Don’t worry, I think I’ve got it all out of my system. I like to think I’m brave, not suicidal. When we land, you’ve got one job to do?”

Snyder grinned. “Let me guess, sir. You want a silhouette of a truck painted on the side of the plane, don’t you?”

* * *

That evening, Levin and Carter went looking for Morgan and found him sitting against a tree. The expression on his face told them everything.

“So now you know what it’s like,” Carter said quietly. “You just went and killed your first man and it’s eating at you.”

“It could have been worse,” said Levin. “What if you were close enough to see their faces. I haven’t done either and I’m not looking forward to the experience. I just hope to hell I don’t flinch.”

“But I didn’t have to do it,” Jack protested. “I could’ve turned and flown away. I just got pissed off because they’d killed more of our people and they were shooting at me.”