Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

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.

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.