Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

It is with regret that I must inform you that we cannot publish your short story “On the Line with the Soldier Girls.” It simply does not meet our editorial needs at this time.

However, I believe you have talent and you may yet become a published author. I urge you to continue writing.

Sincerely,

Wilmer Cutler,

Associate Editor, the New Yorker magazine

My Dear Daughter,

My sweetest of hearts, I am so terribly sorry to tell you that Daddy has passed away. It was his kidneys, although the doctors say if it wasn’t that it would have been his lungs.

We will bury him tomorrow.

I don’t have words for this, Frangie. My heart is filled with grief. He could be difficult at times, but I loved your father with all my heart and soul, and I am destroyed.

I don’t know how to make this easier for you. I thought maybe I wouldn’t tell you because I know you have so very much to cope with already. But in the end I thought you must be told. I wish there was another way.

I will write to Harder as well. I suppose he will be relieved.

Come home safely to me, Frangie. Obal and I need you.

Your loving mother

33

RIO RICHLIN—BAVARIA, GERMANY

The village is called . . . well, the fact is Rio has forgotten what the village is called. It is yet another village in Germany, much like the last half-dozen villages—neat, orderly, prosperous, and full of resentful, frightened German civilians.

Rio and her platoon—now nearly at full strength—are set to enter the village, secure the roads, power stations, railroad sidings, bridges, etc., and make sure the village is safe for the military police and the occupying authorities.

The village is in marshy territory watered by a sluggish river. Cows and sheep can be seen in wonderfully green fields where they are guarded against refugees by civilians with knobby sticks and pitchforks. Most of the DPs are former slave laborers trying to walk home from Germany, to find a way back to France, Belgium, Ukraine, Poland, Netherlands, and many more nations. Others are concentration camp survivors. Some are people in search of family. Some simply need to get away from the sporadic fighting that continues on the Western Front. And, increasingly, the DPs are Germans fleeing from the Soviets and carrying with them dark tales of mass rape and summary executions at the hands of the Red Army.

But whoever they are, wherever they are from and wherever they are going, the DPs are like swarms of locusts, desperately needing food and water. The occupation authority does what it can, but with a rail system ripped by Allied air attacks, with cities in flame, and with Nazi dead-enders still fighting in pockets of resistance, there is little anyone can do.

As they approach, with Martha Swann walking point for Geer’s squad, they are blocked by a standoff between a farmer and his teenage son, both armed with farm implements, and two hundred or so ragged, desperate DPs. The farmer is swinging a hoe back and forth, standing literally between the DPs and four pigs in a pen.

Rio pushes through the DPs. “Anyone here speak English?”

Of course the answer is no, but some of the DPs have a few words, and Mazur is able to identify the language they are speaking

as Polish, which makes these DPs longtime slaves of the Nazis.

Rio levels her Thompson at the German farmer. “You or the pigs?” she asks. “I shoot you. Bang, bang. Or I shoot the pigs. Bang, bang.” She emphasizes her point with hand gestures and in the end fires a quick burst into three of the pigs. She points at the last pig and gestures for the farmer to get himself and his surviving pig into the barn.

The DPs fall on the dead animals and the butchery begins, which effectively gets the crowd out of the way so the platoon can march through.

Geer’s squad, formerly Rio’s, which now consists of Jack Stafford, Jenou Castain, Beebee, Milkmaid Molina, Martha Swann, Rudy J. Chester, and a handful of greenhorns who probably have names, but whose names are not yet important to anyone but themselves, leads the way into the village.

It is a particularly picturesque village, bordering on becoming a town, with a central square ringed by sagging, half-timbered buildings that must be centuries old. There is a church, but it’s nothing special in the jaded estimation of GIs who’d by now seen a dozen major cathedrals.

Rio soon sees the signs of looting. Doors have been kicked in, windows smashed, and everything from personal items of clothing to random bits of furniture to store mannequins have been strewn in the main street.

“Dammit!” Beebee cries. “The place has been gone over!”

There is a fine line between occupation and looting, and the Americans have long since crossed that line. GIs have abandoned any sense of limitations when it comes to stealing. And Rio, like most noncoms and indeed officers, has prudently chosen to draw the line not at theft but at the harming of civilians.