“What you might ought to do is marry that sergeant with the spectacles. Men with glasses are smart, and smart men don’t beat on their women.”
Has Manning read her mind? “Sergeant Green is just an acquaintance.”
Manning is silent for a full minute before finally saying, “If you say so.” It comes out singsong.
The column is moving uphill away from the beach, and Frangie looks back, seeing just a wedge of Omaha Beach framed by hedges. From this distance she does not see bodies, just a confused mess of trucks and boats and ships. Overhead, P-47s, their wings heavy with racks of missiles, zoom by, the whine of their engines a counterpoint to the rumble and clank of the tanks.
The road is paved here, but narrow, made to feel narrower still when they pass through hedges that rise ten feet or more on either side, nearly turning the road into a
tunnel. The column stops and starts every few minutes, but they are off the beach and definitely in France.
“I suspect we are part of history,” Frangie says, meaning it as a self-deprecating remark.
“Oh, I don’t have to suspect,” Manning says. “This is the biggest thing this old girl has ever been even close to. Before this the biggest thing I ever did was come in second in the third-grade spelling bee.”
“What tripped you up?”
Manning’s long fingers tighten on the steering wheel, and she glares. “Prestidigitation. It means something like a magic trick.” She looks sharply at Frangie. “Can you spell it?”
“I don’t think I’ll try,” Frangie says. She’s wondering how much conversation she can manage with Manning. Wondering if she should cut it off. But Frangie does not have the capacity to ignore someone, and Manning is looking at her instead of the road, so Frangie says, “P-r-e-s-d—”
“Hah! It’s ‘t.’ P-r-e-s-t-i-d-i-g-i-t-a-t-i-o-n. You’d have missed it too. Well, I’ll be. How about you, Deacon?”
“All I can spell is tired,” Deacon says. “T-i-r-e-d. I can use it in a sentence if you want.”
Up ahead, far up the column, an explosion. Frangie fidgets, not sure what to do, not sure what her duty is. But no call comes for a medic, and after a few minutes the column begins clanking forward again. They come to an area where the narrow path between hedges opens up into a low-lying field. And there she sees the Sherman with its left tread spooled off and a smoke scar up the side.
“Anyone hurt?” she asks a sergeant.
“Nah. Fool went driving off into a minefield. Just lost a tread.”
The column moves on, and whatever slight relaxation Frangie had begun to feel is gone now. Mines. This innocent, late-spring landscape is not innocent at all.
They rattle on for ten more minutes when louder explosions, and more, one after another, boom! boom! boom! echo back from the front of the column.
Frangie’s jeep is trapped between overbearing hedges on either side, the rear end of a belching Sherman ahead, and the press of men and vehicles coming off the beach behind. They are boxed in.
Machine guns ahead, speaking two different languages, the zipper of a German MG42 spitting twelve hundred rounds per minute, and the answering American Browning .50 calibers, firing at half the rate. Smoke rises into the sky.
There’s more artillery, then a big, metallic CLANG! as something hits steel-plate armor. Frangie’s view is almost completely blocked, but she sees fire and flying debris. Then a Sherman fires, reminding Frangie of a tobacco-chewer spitting angrily. A second later the tank shell explodes on its target.
A file of GIs comes running past, infantry, their rifles held at port arms. Soon she hears machine gun and rifle fire.
It’s half an hour of sitting in her hedge-and-steel enclosure before the column moves again, and this time they pass a destroyed Sherman. Its turret lies in a hedge, trapped by the tight-woven branches. The rest of the tank burns and smokes.
There’s a medic tending a wounded man in a ditch, and Frangie calls to him. “Need a hand?”
The medic waves her on. “Superficial.”
“What about that crew?” she asks, indicating the burning tank.
“No help for those boys,” the medic says darkly.
Again the column advances between the hedges, the hedges so thick, so dense, that they somehow were only partly crushed by the full weight of a tank turret.
At a wide spot in the road the Shermans squeeze aside to let a jeep with a white major rush past. Ahead Frangie can just glimpse a church tower indicating a village.
The column lurches back to life and motors on.