Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  Berlin is closer.

  18

  RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NORMANDY, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

  It is the refugees who make it possible for Rainy.

  They are everywhere, on roads, in fields, running away south and east from Norman villages annihilated by Allied bombs or naval gunfire or artillery. Normandy, not Brittany after all, old Ike has fooled everyone. The American military is devoted to the idea of cutting US casualties by the use of overwhelming destructive power—destructive power that falls on the Germans but also anyone close by.

  Towns, villages, and farms burn. Retreating Germans loot whatever they can carry away, and what they don’t loot the Americans and Allies do. The French people are caught between an American hammer and a German anvil, between bitter German soldiers and jumpy, suspicious Americans.

  Rainy has broken the refugees down into types. Women predominate because many young men have been sent away for forced labor, or else are Vichy-collaborating milice, or with the maquis, or lying in a French military cemetery. The women wear layers of clothing despite the heat, knowing that they will be seeing cold nights and rain. They carry all they can—bags and suitcases, sausages and cheeses stuffed into pockets.

  Then there are the children, some solemn and holding their mothers’ coat or sleeve, some skylarking because, after all, they are children. Babies cry. Toddlers sniffle. Siblings break out in squabbles but fall silent when the oppressive air of fear wears them down.

  The men are mostly old. This war and the previous war and forced labor have killed or imprisoned most of the younger men, and many younger women as well. The men carry small chests on their backs or push wheelbarrows piled with household possessions.

  Women, children, and old men, all plodding down roads and ditches, through fields and woods, a great moving mass of downcast, frightened people, all heading away.

  Rainy is moving in the other direction. No one seems to care, including the Germans. She has a big, bloody bandage wrapped around her head. It covers one eye, which is bad if she has to aim a weapon, but has the effect of showing only the right side of her face. On her head she wears a filthy cloche she took from a dead woman. It is pulled low to hide her military-short hair. What shows of her face she has dirtied.

  But it’s the blood that is the masterstroke. She’d had to cut the back of her arm to get the blood and saturate the torn fabric she used as gauze. People don’t make eye contact with wounded folks. People don’t want to think about the eye beneath the bandage, the eye that seems to have bled quite a bit.

  She has her forged papers, but over the course of three days she has been challenged only once when a Wehrmacht corporal decided to take her into the woods and use her. She’d started to undress as if complying, then wrapped her ragged, much-torn coat around the Walther to muffle the sound of the shot.

  It made a smoky mess of the left side of her coat, with a bullet hole and a big smear of gunpowder residue, but with each day the roads are more jammed with refugees, and she is more invisible.

  She is on foot wearing a decent if overlarge pair of boots. She is not proud of how she came to have the boots, because she looted them from a shoe store that had just been looted by Germans. They’d taken all the fancy shoes, the high heels, the men’s dress shoes, but left the ugly, practical footwear. She thought of leaving a bit of her hoarded currency behind, but a crisp twenty reichsmarks note might attract attention. Instead she makes a mental note to come back someday and pay the proprietor.

  I may be an assassin, but I’m no thief.

  The thought brings with it a droll smile.

  It is midday, hot, the sun steaming the clouds. Rainy’s feet are blistered. She is hungry and thirsty, and the villages she passes through are either thoroughly looted or burned, or both. Food is on the minds of every refugee. Already Rainy has seen women and children bending over to drink muddy water from ditches and puddles.

  The sound of machine guns precedes the sound of engines. She looks up, shades her eyes, and sees two planes coming low and slow, crossing the road left to right. The planes are firing toward a stand of woods well back from the road across a field.

  They zoom overhead, guns blazing, and Rainy sees the black-and-white invasion stripes on the wings and relaxes: they are either USAAF or RAF, not Luftwaffe. P-38 Lightnings, easily identified by the twin tails.

  The two P-38s take a tight turn over the woods and come tearing back, parallel with the road this time. They each drop a bomb, with one landing in the woods and the other landing in the field, killing a horse.

  The refugees—all but Rainy—have leapt into the ditch running beside the road, but now a dozen or more leap from cover and go racing across the field to the dead horse. A dead horse is food, and many run with knives already drawn for butchery.

  The P-38s are not done. They come arcing around for another pass, good, conscientious pilots ensuring that they have destroyed whatever was hiding in the woods.

  What happens next is terribly clear. Rainy has spent many hours poring over aerial reconnaissance maps. She knows what the world looks like to a fighter pilot buzzing low at two hundred miles an hour. Tanks look like trucks and half-tracks. And humans are dark smears, blurry shadows. At two hundred mph no one is able to spot a uniform versus a civilian coat. Anything, a broom or a hoe, can look like a rifle.

  The P-38s came in at treetop level, engines roaring, and begin firing .50 caliber machine guns and cannon, strafing what the pilots must have thought were fleeing Germans, but are in reality hungry refugees.

  “No!” Rainy cries, a futile protest, unheard in the cacophony of exploding cannon shells and screams.

  The planes fly off, and now more screams, more cries, a blood-drenched child wandering in the field, a woman crawling, a man dragging a foot attached by nothing but torn meat.

  Rainy runs toward them, half her mind afraid that the P-38s might come around one more time, the other half grappling with her utter inability to do anything. She is not a medic. She is not a nurse. And when she reaches the dozen men and women, three dead, three more wounded, she finds she can do nothing. Nothing at all but stare in horror.

  A man shoves her aside and mutters something about knowing what he’s doing. He has a long, curved knife and sets about butchering the horse with quick, efficient cuts. A butcher, plying his trade with his feet planted in the blood of a dying woman.

  More refugees now pour into the field, some to gather their lost or frightened loved ones, most to get some of the steaming red meat now being doled out by the butcher.

  A woman with children in tow walks back across the field, all of them carrying chunks of horse meat in their hands. Rainy knows that this image will join many other horrors in her nightmares. Mothers ignoring mothers keening over their lost children, focusing on keeping their own fed and alive.

  Rainy moves on, foot following foot, ashamed of the scrap of raw horse’s haunch in her pocket. The blood of the meat will seep into the breech of her Walther and she thinks, I’ll need to clean that.

  Mile after mile, a salmon swimming upstream, she moves opposite to the refugee flow, trying not to see the fear in faces, trying not to hear the cries of hunger from children, trying not to see a legless old war veteran hauling himself along on a board resting on wheels taken from an office chair.

  All this suffering because of one mad bastard in Berlin.

  After a while she creeps off the road into the woods and makes a small fire. She spears the hunk of horse meat on a stick and cooks the meat until it sizzles and drips fat. She eats it while it is still so hot it burns her hands and mouth.

  It is better, tastier, than the horse meat from the café she’d been at with Marie. Hunger makes flavor.

  Revived, she drinks from a small stream, cleans her pistol, and rejoins the road. Closer to the battle lines now, the refugees carry less and less. These are the ones who held on, who thought they might tough it through, but have been driven out by German military police and milice.
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br />   Go, leave now, you have five minutes to pack.

  And now, closer to the battle, the roads are jammed by Germans going in both directions, beaten units fleeing toward the rear, fresh units going toward the fight. Rainy begins to see wounded Germans now, men in dusty gray with bandaged limbs and bellies and heads. Some still carry their Mausers or Schmeissers, their Panzerfausts and mortar tubes; others have abandoned their weapons and shuffle along, staring blankly at nothing, faces haggard.

  German ambulances try to force their way through soldiers, refugees, and farm animals, and all spill into ditches and fields. Some of the fields are mined, and single refugees, or groups, are blown apart when they wander into them.

  It is the full chaotic misery of war: wounded soldiers, terrified civilians, men on their way to battle, hunger, thirst, worry, fear, degradation.

  At a crossroads all traffic stops so an SS tank unit can push through. Rainy finds herself in a ditch with other refugees, listening to grumbling from regular Wehrmacht troops about the SS, their special treatment, their nice new uniforms, their updated weapons.

  This is interesting, but not new. The Allied intelligence services have long known of the tensions between SS and regular army divisions.

  Rainy’s pulse quickens. She has found the Das Reich again, though too late. The Das Reich is obviously already committed to battle, and she has been able to do nothing to warn Allied planners.

  Then, purely by chance, she spots a chubby sergeant. He is the man who took brioches from the bakery in Oradour.

  The Das Reich division is nominally nineteen thousand men, though it is surely under that strength now. Like any American division, it is broken into companies and platoons. This sergeant, this one chubby Nazi, is a link to the company that gunned down the residents of Oradour. Rainy will never get this chance again. She waits by the side of the road, facedown like a frightened civilian, eyes raised to watch.

  Adolf Diekmann does not travel by car this time. This time he rides in a tank. Rainy almost does not recognize the sturmbannführer without the broad grin and the happy-go-lucky air. He seems downcast, eyes hollowed by weariness and . . . and guilt?

  No, Rainy tells herself, not guilt. The SS do not feel guilt.

  She waits until they are past, then follows. She cannot hope to keep up, but if she just keeps walking she will, sooner or later, come to wherever the smiling Sturmbannführer’s unit is based.

  Rainy walks as night falls. Walks as the heat of the day dissipates. Walks on increasingly empty roads as the refugees flop exhausted by the side of the road. Soon there are only military vehicles. She notes with grim amusement that they ride with lights off, feeling their way through the black night in fear of the romping Allied planes.

  Finally she can walk no more and passes a miserable night in the woods, with refugee families snoring all around. The next morning she pushes on and things have changed. She can hear distant explosions. Sometimes she hears the rattle of machine guns. The air smells of smoke, and great pillars of it rise in the north.

  She walks now through an increasingly chaotic scene. The roads are narrow with tall, imposing hedges on either side. German artillery can be seen in fields, their long tubes aiming north, belching fire and smoke. She passes masses of German trucks pulled up in fields reduced to churned mud. She passes a German field hospital, with huge red crosses painted on tents in hopes of being spared by the marauding Allied planes.

  She comes to a bend in the road and upon turning stops suddenly, face-to-face with a column of German tanks and trucks, all blackened by fire, many extravagantly dismembered. They look as if they were fashioned out of clay, their armor twisted, their cannon barrels curled. Some still burn sullenly. A team of Osttruppen, Poles and Russians and Ukrainians forced to fight for their oppressor, works as graves registration teams, pulling charred, stiff bodies from the wreckage. The bodies lie by the side of the road, men missing hands or feet, men with faces turned into fright masks, others seemingly unhurt but still dead. Some of the bodies are burned. The aroma of cooked meat mixes with the stink of decaying flesh to turn Rainy’s stomach.

  She notes that one of the Osttruppers is stripping the bodies of watches, cigarettes, war souvenirs, and packs of crackers or lengths of dry sausages.

  She prizes a twenty reichsmarks note from her box of currency, crumples it in her fist, and tentatively approaches the man who is busy trying to work a ring off the finger of a dead German. He is not happy to be observed.

  “Go away!” he says in heavily accented German.

  “I want food,” she says.

  “Everyone wants food. Fug off!”

  “I have money.”

  That stops the thief in midtwist. He drops the hand with the ring, but the dead man is well into rigor mortis and the hand stays elevated, like a macabre Nazi salute.

  “What money?”

  “Reichsmarks. I have twenty marks. Cash.” She holds it out for him to see. He moves toward it, and she backs away.

  “Food,” she says. “That sausage.” She points at the brown cylinder protruding from his pocket.

  The soldier glances toward his rifle, leaning against a fence post. Rainy carefully draws her Walther, keeping it low so only he will see it. “I can pay you twenty marks, or I can shoot you and take the sausage and keep the money,” she says.

  Am I a thief if I steal what a thief has stolen?

  A worldly smile appears on the man’s features. “I’m a Ukrainian, I won’t die for German honor.” He spits out the words German honor. “Give me your money.”

  They carefully, suspiciously, trade money for sausage.

  “You are hungry, and I have not had a woman in a long time,” the soldier says, leering.

  “I am trying to find my lover,” Rainy says. “He is an SS sturmbannführer with the Das Reich.”

  The man shrugs and jerks his head toward the north. “Up there. Maybe your man is there. But you had better watch out for the maquis, they are killing whores who sleep with Germans.”

  Rainy moves on, gnawing on the sausage, no longer acting the part of a dirty, scared, starving refugee, but living it. Soon she is forced off the road by a rush of German tanks rolling forward. She watches them until they are almost out of sight and then sees them turn right off the road into trees.

  It is another hour’s walk, pushing always against the incessant flow of refugees, till she reaches the spot where the tanks have turned off. She stops. It is not a road to anywhere, the tanks have made their own road, crushing fences and crops to disappear beneath trees they hope will hide them from the eager P-38s and P-47s and Spitfires.

  The deception fails. Three P-47s, their wings heavy with missile pods, lacerate the stand of trees with pass after pass, firing missiles, blazing away with machine guns. As soon as they are gone, Rainy moves closer. The German encampment is in a fury of activity, with medics hauling men from tanks, soldiers spraying fire extinguishers on burning trucks, repair crews already assessing damaged treads and twisted gun barrels.

  Veterans, Rainy figures. The chaos is too controlled: this is not their first air raid. Rainy hides behind a fallen log and peeks over the edge just in time to spot the fat German from Oradour, the one person she recognizes, aside from her prey.

  It is the right company. She has found them. Now to wait for him, for the smiling sturmbannführer. Though how she is to take him on in the midst of a company of SS she cannot imagine.

  Are you an assassin now, Rainy Schulterman?

  She watches intently, hour after hour, as the light declines and shadows lengthen, but she does not see him. Nevertheless, she has an idea where he may be: there is a concrete German pillbox at the edge of the wood, well situated to cover the road.

  In there. He must be in there, no doubt laughing happily again, no doubt imagining himself at risk only from the sky.

  She falls asleep, propped against her log. When she awakes it is in sudden panic when the log bounces hard and all the noise in the world descends
with a massive series of crashes.

  At first she thinks the planes are back, but no, this is artillery, big 105 and 155 millimeter shells exploding. And she is in the middle of it, cringing beneath her log, hands pressed against her ears to dim the crashing noise. The ground beneath her bounces and shakes. The air is stifling with the smell of powder and smoke.

  The barrage ends. Sudden silence. Clods of dirt rattle down through the leaves. Rainy hears shouts and cries of pain. Can she get away with walking straight into the chaos and pretending to be a shell-shocked refugee?

  No, they’ll peg her as an informer who gave the location to the Americans. But she can creep closer. She crawls on hands and knees through fallen pine needles, sliding beneath bushes, sometimes crawling on her belly. She reaches a crater, still smoking. A dead German is being hauled out.

  Rainy slides down into the crater, taking the dead man’s place. From this vantage point she is much closer. She can see more and hear a great deal more. A gaggle of officers is at the entrance to the pillbox, smoking and occasionally barking orders. The pillbox has been hit but not damaged beyond a smoke mark.

  Three officers. One with his back to her. She cannot see his face, cannot tell the color of his hair beneath his hat.

  No closer, Rainy: wait.

  She listens. Talk of moving to a different map grid. Discussion of whether they’ll find cover there. Names mentioned in low voices, the dead. Then a laugh and someone mentions that the damned Americans have blown up the officers’ latrine and a joke about not defecating until they are back in Berlin.

  One of the officers, perhaps prodded by this, walks a few paces, and urinates against a tree. The man with his back to Rainy laughs and goes in pursuit of his own tree.

  For a brief moment, only a moment, she sees his face.

  Can she? Not without being caught. A single pistol round will have the whole camp racing here, guns blazing.

  Is it worth dying to kill this one Nazi butcher?

  The decision is physical as much as mental, as if her own body has decided, as if she is being moved against her will. She stands up and in German says, “Don’t be alarmed, Herr Sturmbannführer, I have only come to make you an offer.”