Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

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.