Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  Hundreds of German grenadiers stepped out from behind the fog-bound pine trees that encircled the American camp. Draped in white sheets, they were beautifully camouflaged by the snow. They had even covered their machine pistols with white cloths.

  We’re surrounded, Charlie thought, his heart sinking as his gaze swept over the ghostly figures that had obviously stolen into their positions during the blitz.

  “Surrender!” the German commander demanded in English.

  But his American counterpart had not yet begun to fight. Captain Quinn scanned the anxious faces of his men, now down to less than half their original strength of two hundred, then cupped his hands around his mouth like a megaphone and yelled back, “Go to hell!”

  The Germans advanced on the Americans from all sides then, shooting on the run and shouting something that sounded like, “Sturm!”

  Standing behind the machine gun he’d stepped up to, Quinn waited until the grenadiers were about twenty yards away before ordering, “Fire!”

  Charlie adjusted his broken glasses and sighted his rifle, planning to do exactly that. This was his first chance to prove himself, and he wanted to do it right. But when he squeezed the trigger, nothing happened.

  “My gun’s frozen!” the man in the foxhole next to his cried.

  “Work the bolt!” Quinn directed.

  “No time!”

  Charlie’s jaw dropped in utter disbelief when the dough urinated into the chamber of his M-1, trying to provide enough heat to thaw it out.

  “That one’s for the medic!” he declared not two minutes later, after he’d mowed down a German with his now-working rifle.

  Realizing that his gun was probably frozen too, Charlie reached inside his coat for his fly . . . and found that he’d already pissed in his pants.

  “The hell with it!” A disgusted GI threw down his disabled weapon and sat back to await his fate.

  That fate, Charlie was stunned to see, was a German bullet between the eyes.

  “Stay down!” a scared rifleman warned as slugs flew over the trenches from north and south, east and west.

  “Stand up to the sonsuvbitches!” Quinn countermanded above a steady volley of machine-gun fire.

  Desperate for a weapon to use, Charlie threw his ice-bound M-1 aside and started to climb out of his foxhole to retrieve one of the rifles littering the snow. But a bullet whizzed past his head like some berserk bee and he had to slide back down.

  “Fight back, goddamn you!” an enraged Quinn ordered when he saw how easily his men were being overrun.

  But dazed by the devastating barrage and demoralized by both that withering crossfire and their own inability to return it, many of the Americans were breaking down their rifles and raising their hands.

  The German commander called a halt to the attack and, as the firing died away, repeated firmly, “Surrender!”

  Bleeding profusely from a gaping hole in his thigh, Captain Quinn reeled at the sharp directive but somehow managed to remain on his feet.

  His ruddy face seemed to crumple in on itself with grief as he looked at the wounded and the dead piled up around him. With a visible effort, he pulled himself together and turned to the men who’d survived the onslaught but had failed to follow his orders. He glared at each of them in turn, telling them without words that they had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

  Then Quinn drew his service revolver out of his shoulder holster and brandished it in their wincing faces. “Stand and fight, you yellow-bellied—”

  A crescendo of cracks ruptured the air. Bullets hit him from all directions. His head snapped back and his body thrust forward from the impact, and he was dead before he reached the ground.

  Several Germans stepped forward in the ensuing silence. One kicked Quinn’s pistol away. Another picked it up for a souvenir. Yet a third expertly looted the deceased’s pockets, taking his cigarettes and his money, while a fourth slid his watch off his wrist.

  “At least he kept his honor,” one of the besieged GIs muttered under his breath.

  “Quiet!” the German commander barked.

  “Blow it out your ass, you motherfu—”

  A single deafening explosion cut off the GI in mid-curse. He slumped back in his hole, his head falling forward as if he were peacefully taking a nap. Only the small scarlet circle staining the front of his graycoat indicated that he’d died violently.

  No one moved for several shocked seconds. Finally, the remaining GIs let go of their weapons and got to their feet. In a final token of defeat, they removed their helmets before they raised their hands in surrender.

  Figuring that this was the end, that he was going to die without ever having fired a shot in his own defense, Charlie said a silent goodbye to both his wife and his unborn child and followed suit.

  The victorious Germans swarmed in, machine pistols at the ready, and started rounding up the vanquished Americans.

  Charlie was still standing in his foxhole when he was shoved from behind. A sudden, murderous rage shivered through him, supplanting the stark terror that had rendered him totally impotent during the shelling and the subsequent firefight. He swung around, hands fisted, and found himself facing the barrel of a burp gun.

  He looked up, into Teutonic blue eyes that blazed like acetylene torches in the bleak morning light. At the same time that his pride goaded him to fight, every muscle in his body tensed for flight. But there was nowhere to run, he realized as his gaze widened to encompass the furious orange fire staining the horizon behind the trees. And even if by some miracle he did manage to escape into the woods, something told him there was no safe place to hide for miles around.

  Overwhelmed by a rush of shame so profound that it damn near drove him to his knees, Charlie dropped his eyes, relaxed his fists and surrendered without a fight.

  The cold steel barrel of that burp gun burned into his temple as his German captor said in guttural English, “For you, the War is over!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ste. Genviève, France

  Except for the late February chill having driven the patrons of the sidewalk café inside, the village looked pretty much the same as he remembered it.

  Mike stood in the square, where the driver of the Army truck had left him, feeling as if he’d stepped into another world. A peaceful world, away from the blood and the mud and the misery of war. He looked around him, at the store windows with their meager display of goods for sale, and couldn’t help but smile when two children ran out of the bakery, laughing. It had been ages since he’d heard the laughter of children. And something told him that it would be a long time before he heard it again.

  “Bonjour, m’sieur,” said a woman carrying a long loaf of bread under her arm as she followed the children out of the shop.

  He nodded in a friendly manner but his smile disappeared as soon as she ducked into the butcher’s. There was no use getting accustomed to the sights and the sounds of normal life. No sense in relaxing his guard too much. Because in four hours there would be another truck—a truck full of replacements rolling east, toward Germany. And by this time tomorrow, he would be back at the front, directing fire on the enemy and sweating bullets himself.

  But today—or for these next few hours, anyway—he was a man on an entirely different kind of mission.

  Mike shouldered the strap of his musette bag, then picked up his bedroll and struck out in the direction of Anne-Marie’s house. It felt good to stretch his legs after the long, bumpy truck ride. To breathe in fresh, clean air instead of the foul odors of death and decay. Best of all, though, was being able to walk down a street without having to worry about what lay around the next corner.

  He turned his face to the noon sun, its pale rays doing as much to bolster his spirits as those two weeks in a hospital bed had done to heal his body.

  Just that morning he’d been released from the 168th General Hospital back at Omaha Beach. The beach was a place he’d sincerely hoped to never visit again, but he’d had
no choice in the matter. After being wounded twice in action and surviving the German breakthrough in the Battle of the Bulge, he’d damn near died from a botched tonsillectomy.

  He’d been plagued by colds and a low-grade fever since Christmas, so he hadn’t been overly concerned when he went to the battalion aid station for yet another sore throat. Expecting the standard swabbing with gentian violet, he got a surprise instead. The surgeon said that his tonsils were badly infected but that he didn’t have the time or the proper equipment to remove them, so had sent him by jeep to a field hospital some fifty miles away.

  The scene in that unheated field hospital, with row after row of stretchers full of wounded men and medics walking up and down between them weeding out the most urgent surgery cases, had reminded Mike of one from Gone with the Wind. He took a seat in the back of the gymnasium-sized room to wait his turn. Five, maybe six hours later, a nurse came by and gave him a whiff of something she euphemistically called an “anesthetic.” The next thing he knew a tall, tired-looking surgeon stopped in front of him and told him to “Open wide.”

  He’d done as he was ordered, and the doctor had reached down his throat with an instrument that looked like a pair of ordinary mechanic’s pliers and yanked out a couple of pieces of bloody tissue.

  The next morning, hemorrhaging from his nose and throat and burning up with fever, Mike had been flown by liaison plane to the hospital on the beach. He’d lain there for almost a week, drifting in an out of consciousness and dreaming about Anne-Marie. When he finally awoke, the recollection of her pretty face and pixie smile was still in his head. That was when he decided to stop and see her on the way back to his battalion.

  Now he was standing on her doorstep, showered and shaved and dressed to kill . . . or be killed.

  The orderly had stripped him of his old tank suit when he was admitted to the hospital, and a new one had been issued to him upon his release. Supply had even replaced the cumbersome combination of combat boots and buckled overshoes he’d been wearing with snowpak boots, which had tall leather tops sewn to a rubber shoe. While they weren’t insulated, they were light and warm over the socks his sister had knitted for him.

  He’d left his helmet at the aid station, so he was wearing a campaign cap with the silver bar of his first lieutenant’s rank pinned at the front. A wool Eisenhower jacket for extra warmth was folded at the bottom of his musette bag. Figuring the Gérards could use them to barter for food or medical supplies, he was also packing two cartons of Lucky Strikes that he’d picked up at the hospital PX.

  Mike had mentally rehearsed what he was going to say during the long ride from the beach. First, he wanted to pay his respects to Dr. Gérard. Then he wanted to talk to Anne-Marie alone for a few minutes and apologize for his crude manhandling of her six months earlier. Despite the erotic nature of some of his dreams, he’d kept his needs under lock and key since leaving Ste. Genviève. Yet he harbored no illusions that he would come away today with anything more than a clear conscience.

  His drills were for naught; no one answered his knock.

  Puzzled, he checked the name on the mailbox and saw that it still read Gérard. Then he double-checked the address, number 23, even though he’d easily recognized the white stucco house with the neat blue trim from his previous visit. He leaned first to one side, then the other, trying to look through the windows that faced the street. But the shades had been pulled and he couldn’t see inside.

  Finally he tried the door. It was unlocked and swung open to his push. He stepped out of the dank cold of the street and into the dreary warmth of the vestibule.

  The doctor’s waiting room, to his right, had been emptied of furniture. As had the combination living and dining room to his left. The smell of woodsmoke lingered in the air, but the dark rectangle on the wood floor where the rug had once laid told him that someone had rolled it up and carted it off.

  But who? And why?

  Things had been a blur since the Bulge, and his mail had been delivered sporadically at best. Right before he got sick, though, he’d had a letter from his mother containing the bad news about Charlie Miller being reported as missing in action and presumed dead. And now that he stopped to think about it, Mike remembered another letter—one from Anne-Marie in late November or early December telling him that her grandfather had died and that she was moving to Paris to attend the university there.

  She was probably long gone, he realized, but he called out her name anyway. “Anne-Marie?”

  There was no answer, save the echo of his voice.

  He tried again—louder this time. “Anne-Marie!”

  And still, the silence drummed in his ears.

  He considered dropping a note in her mailbox for the postman to forward to her in Paris. Or asking one of her old neighbors if they knew her new address. Wondering if he had anything to write on, he turned toward the front door.

  Then he turned back, something beyond his ken prodding him to set his musette bag and bedroll on the floor and take a quick look around.

  Dr. Gérard’s office door was closed.

  Mike resisted the urge to kick it open, a method he’d perfected during the hellish months of house-to-house fighting, and knocked once, politely. Then twice, sharply. Getting no response, he reached for the knob and shouldered the door open.

  Both it and the small bathroom next to it were vacant.

  He left those doors standing ajar and crossed to the living area. The kitchen was at the back of the house, as he recalled. But the cupboards that had once been crammed with dishes and cooking utensils were now bare and the stove was cold to his touch.

  A scuffling sound overhead set his skin to prickling.

  Mike pulled his pistol from his shoulder holster and, using the door that led upstairs as a shield in case someone decided to shoot first and ask questions later, eased it open.

  Anne-Marie was in her bedroom, where she had just finished buttoning up her black wool dress and was starting to fix her hair, when she realized that someone had opened the door downstairs.

  She wasn’t expecting company, though she’d certainly had more than her share of it lately. A steady stream of friends and neighbors had stopped by to bid her farewell. And her family had come three days in a row to remove the furniture and pictures and rugs.

  Nor had she heard anyone enter the house. But that was no surprise. She’d been walking around in a daze all morning, her head reeling and her stomach clutching as she’d wandered from room to empty room, taking a last look around to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything before she caught the evening train to Paris.

  She’d sold the house to a young doctor who was moving in with his family and his own equipment tomorrow. After dividing the proceeds from the sale with her aunt and handing the keys to her grandfather’s coupe to her uncle, she had given all the furnishings to Henriette and Guy as a belated wedding present and donated the medical supplies to the village hospital. Besides her clothing, all she was taking with her were her grandmother’s candelabra and Mike’s picture. Those she had carefully wrapped in his field jacket so they wouldn’t get broken when her trunk was heaved into the train’s baggage car.

  Now, thinking it might be someone else who’d stopped in to say goodbye, she crossed the hall to the top of the stairs and called down to ask who it was. “Qui est-ce?”

  The man who stepped out from behind the door and looked up at her in the dim light of the stairwell was the answer to all of her prayers.

  She stood there dumbly for a moment, drinking in the sight of him. Emotions raced through her body so powerfully, she felt as if she glowed with their electric force. She sensed an equally puissant tension about him as he holstered the pistol, doffed his cap and met her disbelieving eyes with his dark ones.

  “Mike!”

  “Hello, Anne-Marie.”

  Almost breathless with joy, she started down the stairs. “You came back!”

  “Only for a few hours.”

  She stopped halfway
down, her heart stumbling in disappointment. “A few hours?”

  “I’m on my way back to Germany.”

  “No.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I report tonight.”

  Tonight! Anne-Marie gripped the banister rail, her knees growing wobbly at the thought. She needed, wanted time. But there was no time, she realized. No past or future, only the present. And the present was a tyrant, demanding satisfaction now, today, with no promise of tomorrow.

  The present was this man.

  She took a deep breath and let go of the rail. “Je veux de faire l’amour avec vous.”

  Mike felt the space between them dissipate in that instant. He searched her burnt-honey eyes in the shadowy light, and his blood sizzled with the hope that she’d said what he’d waited six long months to hear. Just to be on the safe side, though, he decided he’d better ask for clarification.

  He cupped a hand to his ear. “Come again?”

  “That’s how you say, ‘I want to make love with you’.” Her posture was broomstick straight and her hands were tightly fisted at her sides, but her voice rang as true as fine crystal.

  He cleared his throat, and it sounded unnaturally loud in the narrow confines of the stairwell. “Are you sure?”

  In response, she practically flew the rest of the way down the stairs. He dropped his cap at his feet, then caught her around the waist and crushed her to him, burying his face in the golden mass of hair she’d yet to pin up for traveling. She wreathed her own arms around him and rested her cheek against his solid chest, reveling in his strength and his clean masculine scent.

  Precious minutes ticked by as they stood at the bottom of the stairs, clinging to each other as if they had all the time in the world.

  Mike finally moved one hand, bringing it up from her waist and increasing the pressure on her back until her breasts were flattened against his chest. His other hand glided down to conform to the curve of her bottom, drawing her so close to the burning length of his body that she could feel his heat and his hardness through their clothes. Then, holding her still, he rubbed himself against her with desperation born of long denial.