by David Healey
“Some are wounded and there is not much food in town,” Madame Lavigne said. “Not all of the prisoners are in the church. Some are being held in basements here and there.”
From the sounds of it, a large portion of the infantry regiment that had been occupying Wingen had managed to get itself captured. This wasn’t good news, because it meant that the tanks would not be able to unleash their guns on the Germans, for fear of hitting the Americans held in the village. When the soldiers attacked the village, they would be fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. If the weather cleared enough for the planes to get back in the air, it meant that they couldn’t be used against the village, either.
If Wingen sur Moder was to be taken back from the Germans, it was going to be up to the soldiers to wrest it away using nothing more than rifles and machine guns.
“I’ve heard better news,” Mulholland said. “This is shaping up to be a bloody fight.”
While the stalemate between the Americans and Germans dragged into a second day, Cole used the time to sleep as his fever slowly ebbed. He woke from time to time in confusion, his fever dreams mixing with snatches of memories.
One memory had to do with Christmas. He supposed that his feverish sleep, along with just coming off the holiday season, had prompted the memory. Growing up in the mountains during the Depression, money had been scarce. They never had anything like a Christmas tree or any presents. When he heard the other soldiers wax nostalgic about their own childhood Christmases, Cole sometimes had to wonder if he had grown up in the same country as these other men. The closest that the Cole family ever got to celebrating Christmas was that they ate a big meal with nobody going to bed hungry for a change. His ma would even save up sugar, butter, and eggs so that there was enough to bake a pecan pie. Everyone got one slice. Cole usually collected the pecans himself before the snow fell, harvesting them from a patch that grew in a mountain clearing.
His pa always got drunk at Christmas, but then again, his old man never needed an excuse to get drunk. If the sun rose and set that day, that was usually enough reason for his pa to drink the moonshine that he cooked up in the hills. He might even have made some money with that endeavor if he hadn’t kept drinking most of what he produced.
Once when Cole was a boy, his pa had arrived at the cabin on Christmas Eve just before dark, clearly pleased with himself and grinning from ear to ear. Weaving as he walked, he was drunk as a lord.
“I been to town and done bought you all a stick of peppermint for Christmas,” he said grandly.
He reached into his pocket and brought out … nothing. Puzzled, he patted his other pockets. Empty.
“Pa, where’s the candy?” one of Cole’s younger sisters asked. The thought of a peppermint stick was such a rare treat that she was close to tears.
“Dang it,” he said, reaching into his pocket again and staring at his empty hand. “Didn’t eat it, did I? I reckon I must have dropped all that candy.”
Cole’s mother had heard enough. She was usually too afraid of her husband to speak up. They were all afraid of him. There was no meaner drunk. But Christmas had made her bold. “You drunken fool,” she said sharply. “It ain’t right to tease the children so. You go on inside. Go on.”
His father shrugged and made his way toward the shack.
Cole’s mother gathered them around. “I reckon he done dropped that candy along the way. If you walk back along that road, you’ll find it,” she said. “Stick by stick. Hurry up now, before it gets dark.”
When Pa said that he’d gone to town, he meant the lonely crossroads that had a country store and another building with a gas pump. From their shack, it was six miles down dirt roads to that crossroads. Walking with sharp eyes, they found four sticks of candy along the road. The snow was late coming this year, so it helped that the colorful candy stood out against the drab ground. These were penny sticks, striped red, nearly as thick around as a cornstalk. None of the Cole children had ever had such a thing as a stick of candy. It was an unimaginable luxury. Finding each one was like discovering treasure. The candy sticks were a little dirty, but the dirt brushed off easily enough.
Where the fifth peppermint stick had gone was anybody’s guess—if pa had even been sober enough to actually buy five sticks.
As the oldest, Cole had gone without. His little sister had cracked an end off her stick and tried to give it to him, but he wouldn’t take it.
“Gone on now, I don’t need it,” he’d said, curling her hand back around the candy and giving her fingers a gentle squeeze.
Candy was for children and he was eleven years old. Cole couldn’t ever remember thinking of himself as a child. In a way, he had been born old.
In the foxhole, Cole shivered. Now, why had he remembered all that, he wondered? It was because of the candy that Vaccaro had given him.
He slept again and woke in the dark, men snoring around him. He noticed the stars glittering above and realized that he felt better. His fever had broken.
And none too soon. In the distance, a machine gun chattered. Cole might have slept, but the war had not.
In the center of the village, Sister Anne Marie hurried toward the Eglise Saint-Félix-de-Cantalice, carrying a heavy basket. The church near the village center looked small but sturdy, a bastion of red brick, like a bulwark of faith and hope against sin. The stucco exterior gave the structure a vaguely Tudor appearance. Because it looked as if it had been there for ages, many were surprised that the church had only been built in 1914. This morning, she thought that perhaps the eglise was truly an island in a turbulent sea, considering that the village had found itself caught in the storm of battle. There was no shooting at the moment, which meant that they were in the eye of the storm.
As she walked up the street, instead of the usual handful of pedestrians and bicycles, she passed knots of German soldiers. They had thrown together sturdy defenses by turning carts on their sides or carrying out heavy furniture from the houses.
Soldiers were dragging an old bathtub out of a house to add it to the defenses. The sound of the cast iron scraping across a bare patch in the cobblestoned street grated on the ears, sounding unnaturally loud in the still air.
The sight of armoires and sofas—and now, a bathtub—bristling with machine guns and mortars was a strange one, to say the least. However, the village was not currently under attack since the attempt by the Americans had failed the day before. Even from here, the young nun could see the burned hulk of the American tank near the railroad overpass. Of course, no trains had run in many days due to the fighting. Looking more closely, she could see a body hanging half out of the turret, badly burned. More bodies lay scattered in the snowy road, their drab uniforms in stark contrast against the snow.
If her hands had not been full, she would have made the sign of the cross. Instead, she whispered a prayer.
The Germans that she passed in the street smoked and laughed with one another. Some leaned against the walls of the houses, looking all the more bulky menacing in their heavy winter coats.
Judging by their laughter and their easy conversation, they seemed to be old hands at the business of war. Most ignored her, but a few gave her a polite nod and said, “Guten morgen, Schwester.” Good morning, Sister.
“God’s grace to you,” she replied sincerely.
A few of the looks she received were lascivious, however, and she tugged her shawl tighter around her shoulders and face. God forgive them, she thought. Were men so weak that they could lust after a nun?
If nothing else, she felt a sense of relief that the German sniper who had tried to drop a dead man on her head was nowhere to be seen. A glance up at the church steeple confirmed that he wasn’t up there, either.
Above the surrounding hills, the winter sun shone pale and watery through the gauzy clouds. They would find no warmth there this day. The sunlight wouldn’t even reach into the shady places in the village, leaving the ice and cold to tighten its grip.
Most of the vi
llagers who remained stayed out of sight, keeping to the shelter of cellars and the sturdy stone houses. But Sister Anne Marie knew that she could not hide or flee town as the priest had done. That was not why she had answered the call of her faith and become a nun. Her duty lay here. She had not grown up in this village, but in one that was somewhat larger. Still, there were not many options for a poor girl—even a pretty one. Her choices were to become a spinster schoolteacher or nurse, a wife to a young man who was equally as poor, or if she was lucky, to marry some middle-aged merchant who would treat her like a servant.
Instead, the church had offered another choice. She received an education and a certain independence of mind that becoming a wife would never allow. Also, she received some measure of respect when she had donned those habits.
Although the decision had mystified some of her friends and family, she gladly became Sister Anne Marie.
Did she love God? Of course—and she had come to love Him more deeply in the short time that she had been a nun.
On this morning, as war raged, there was nothing that she would rather do than serve God by helping others. This was the truth that kept her warm despite the cold.
Again, the door to the church stood open, although the entrance remained guarded. The guards barely gave her a glance as she came in. They were used to her coming and going by now.
She crinkled her nose against the smell that greeted her inside. The church always had been old and damp, but now she smelled the overflowing latrine buckets against the walls, the musky smell of unwashed male bodies crowded together, and an undercurrent of rotting meat from wounds that desperately needed treatment.
“Hello, Sister,” said the young soldier named Joey, eagerly greeting her. He offered to take the heavy basket from her, but she declined, fearing that as weak as he looked, it might knock him down.
She reached up and touched the bandage around his head. The scalp wound had bled freely and now the cloth was stiff as tree bark. “How is your head?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m fine,” he said. “A lot of these guys are worse off than me.”
Unfortunately, Sister Anne Marie knew that to be true. “Let me see what I can do,” she said. “Will you help?”
“Sure I will.”
The basket was stuffed with as much as she had been able to forage. A few bottles of water and a few tins of things like canned sausages. She looked around at the more than two hundred men crowded into the church. What she had brought was not enough. What she needed was a miracle, but she was no saint. She dreaded the thought, but she might have to go to the German commander to see if he could help with supplies.
“You there!” shouted a deep voice from the doorway.
Sister Anne Marie turned, and her heart sank to see that it was the German sniper whom she thought she had avoided. “What do you want?” she demanded, realizing that she did not sound very sisterly just then.
“I want to see what’s in that basket.”
Beside her, she sensed Joey starting to take a step forward as if to intercept the German, protecting her. She was sure that would not end well. “No,” she whispered to him, and the boy hung back.
The big soldier strode toward her, his deadly rifle with its telescopic sight slung over one shoulder. The guards had no intention of interfering. In fact, they seemed intimidated by the sniper. One of them intently studied the roof beams.
“There’s nothing here that you would want,” she said. “It is only supplies for the soldiers.”
“Supplies for the American soldiers,” the German pointed out. He reached into the basket and withdrew a jar of blackberry jam. “They do not deserve such luxuries. I will share this with the German soldiers.”
Sister Anne Marie tried to lock eyes with the sniper, hoping that a stern look from a nun might help, but his face remained hard and unmoving. “Whatever you say,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “You are lucky that I am letting you keep any of it for diese Schafe.” These sheep. “You know what sheep are good for, don’t you? Mutton and chops. Sheep are not soldiers.”
With that, the sniper turned and took his time walking out of the church.
Sister Anne Marie felt herself breathing again. Her heart pounded with fear—and anger, which she knew was not an entirely Christian emotion. She took a moment to breathe deeply and compose herself.
“I’d like nothing better than to tell that Kraut to go to hell,” Joey said. He flicked an apologetic glance at her. “Sorry, Sister. No offense.”
“None taken.” She had been thinking about telling the German the same thing, even if she hadn’t spoken it aloud. “Now, let’s see if we can share this among the others.”
Very quickly, the supplies that she had brought were used up. Once again, she had been forced to let the German soldier take what he wanted, which further cut into her supplies. Her medical skills were inadequate to treat the more grievously injured soldiers, who suffered silently. Unless they received real medical care, some might die.
As she and the young soldier passed out the last of what she had brought, she said, “I may have to appeal to a higher authority than these guards.”
“God?” he asked, puzzled.
“No, the German commanding officer.”
Chapter Thirteen
Her mind made up, Sister Anne Marie hurried down the street, dodging glances from the German soldiers she passed. Reluctantly, she had come to the conclusion that she must see the German commanding officer. The prisoners were short on supplies, lacking everything from food to blankets to basic medical attention. Ultimately, the prisoners were his responsibility. Sister Anne Marie could not provide for them, but perhaps he could.
Before crossing the street, she had kept an eye out for the sniper who had harassed her at the church. Sister Anne Marie liked to believe that there was good in everyone, but she had serious doubts about that particular soldier. She spotted a group of soldiers smoking cigarettes, bouncing on the balls of their feet to stay warm in the cold, and approached them.
“I am looking for your commanding officer,” she announced to one of the young soldiers who appeared more cordial than the others.
“He is in that big house there,” said the soldier, pointing to what Anne Marie knew to be the mayor’s home before he fled. A look of concern crossed the soldier’s face. “Is everything all right, Sister?”
“I am going to see your commanding officer on behalf of the American prisoners,” she said.
“Are you sure that you want to do that?”
Nearby, one of his companions guffawed. “You won’t get very far with Colonel Lang. He doesn’t like civilians—or nuns.”
But she remained undeterred. “Why wouldn’t I go to see him? He is in charge, isn’t he? I must discuss the care of the prisoners with him.”
“In that case, I wish you luck,” the young soldier said, shaking his head. “But if I were you, I would not argue too hard on behalf of the Americans.”
The young soldier’s comments had not been encouraging, but she continued toward the mayor’s house, apparently now occupied by the commanding officer. Looking more closely, she could see two soldiers standing guard beside the door.
The mayor, along with the priest and the two town constables, had fled ahead of the Germans, leaving the villagers to fend for themselves without their leaders. Considering that the house was the grandest in the village and centrally located, it made sense that the German commander had moved in.
She approached the guards, who had been slouching against the wall, but now stood up straight as she walked toward them.
“What is it sister?” one of the guards asked brusquely.
“I am here to see your commanding officer.”
“Colonel Lang is busy.”
“It is important.”
The soldier stared at her for a long moment, but she did not lower her gaze. She suspected that if she had not been wearing a nun’s habit, she would have been sent on her way—or wor
se. He had not lowered his weapon.
“Wait here.”
“Bless you,” she said.
The soldier glanced at his companion, as if silently warning him to keep an eye on her, then went inside. He was back a minute later.
“Colonel Lang said he can spare five minutes for you, and no more.”
She followed him inside. Immediately, she was struck by the transformation of the mayor’s house, which had once been a respectable middle-class home with fine furniture and carpets, and even a few oil painting on the walls, valuable old landscapes that had been handed down through the family. Much of the village’s business had been conducted there in the home’s comfortable atmosphere, usually in the mayor’s study on the first floor.
Now, the mayor’s house was a shambles. Snow and mud had been tracked across the floors and carpets. Equipment and even cartridge boxes covered the tables and chairs. Windows bristled with machine guns, some of the glass broken out. The oil paintings were all gone, stolen along with anything else of value.
She was ushered into the mayor’s study, where some of the furniture had been broken up and was now burning in the fireplace in an attempt to keep the winter chill at bay. That wasn’t an easy task, considering that one of the windows was open to the cold air, telephone lines snaking through it to a pair of field telephones on what had been the mayor’s desk.
Colonel Lang turned out to be a tall man of no more than forty years of age. His thinning blond hair was slicked back against his scalp. His boots were covered in slush and like his men, he wore several days of stubble on his face. He looked cranky and exhausted.
He shouted one last order into a telephone as she entered and then turned his attention to her.
Sister Anne Marie noticed the other men in the room. There was a young officer holding some papers who might be an adjutant of some kind, along with a clerk. With a tiny gasp of recognition, she saw that the sniper was also present. The man seemed to be everywhere, like the Devil himself. He looked at her with an expressionless face.
