Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Outside the tent Frangie looks up at the sky. Gray. Gray and more gray. Until the weather changes there can be no airdrops of supplies, and the roads are closed, with nothing coming in.

She stumbles toward the smell of food. There’s a field kitchen, but all it serves are C rations warmed up over wood fires. They are burning the pews of the village church, carried to them, donated by the Belgian priest and a parishioner with a donkey cart but no donkey.

She makes the mistake of glancing left. There is the pile of unburied dead, frozen, GI and Kraut, their faces the awful maroon that so often results from freezing. A smaller pile is made of nothing but limbs. Arms and legs. Both gruesome piles are dusted with snow.

Frangie eats with mechanical indifference, pushing fuel in, stoking the failing fire inside her. The first time she’d sat at the rough table outside the field tent she’d earned dirty looks and cruel words from some soldiers. What the hell was a Nigra doing eating with decent white folks?

But no one has the energy for that now. And everyone, even the greenest yahoo from Alabama, has come to realize the sacred importance of anyone, man, woman, white or black, with a red cross on their helmet.

Frangie trudges back to her jeep. Despite the desperate lack of fuel, she’d left the engine running—a stopped engine was a dead engine in this cold. But now it has stopped, and when she tries to start it the ignition makes one sluggish grunt and no more.

It is a mile and a half back to the front, and she walks it on numb feet. She’s already lost a little toe to frostbite. She’d borrowed Rio’s koummya to chop it off.

One foot in front of the next. That was it. That is what her brain thought of. One foot and then the next. There was no point in thinking of anything else. The world of warmth and clean clothing and warm beds was a lie, a fantasy. It was a fragment of dream she remembered but knew was unreal.

This was real. These blackened, denuded trees, like black javelins stabbed into the earth, they were real. The sound of artillery was real. The sudden gust that passed through her layers as easily as a knife’s blade and spread goose bumps over her flesh was real.

She trips and falls

.

She lies there in the snow and thinks, Just stay . . . just stay . . . Her eyes close.

Enough.

Sleep.

If she lies here, in an hour she will be dead.

But after twenty minutes there comes the sound of wheels on snow. The squeal of brakes. The sound of boots on snow.

Hands touch her, grab her clothing, and she thinks, Ah, I’m dead and being stripped . . .

“Marr! Hey!” A hand slaps the side of her face.

Frangie opens her eyes and sees dark-brown eyes beneath a helmet marked with a first lieutenant’s rectangle.

“Come on, let’s go,” the woman says, and Frangie thinks, I know her.

“What the hell are you doing, Marr?” Rainy asks as she and her driver bundle a nearly frozen Frangie into the passenger seat.

“Let me go,” Frangie says, though her words are indecipherable.

“Hey,” Rainy says, taking Frangie’s face in her two hands. “You giving up?”

Frangie nods. Yes. Yes, she is giving up and letting go of life and will, she hopes and believes, fly to the arms of Jesus in a warm, warm heaven . . .

“Hey!” Rainy shakes Frangie’s face. “Before you give up, look up.”

Rainy takes Frangie’s head and forces her to look up. And there Frangie sees something impossible. A field of blue. And in that field of blue great white flowers blossom.

“S’that real?” Frangie asks.

Rainy grins. “Blue skies, Marr. Blue skies and parachutes.”

The great white flowers drift down beyond the trees, each slowing the weight of boxes of food and ammunition.

The weather has cleared. The C-47s are dropping supplies.