and you will understand perfectly.” He chuckled madly and winked at the major.
At 1:20 that afternoon, Maurice returned from Eisenhower with the first truckload of pieced-up barn walls. They were standing on edge in the back of a board-sided German cargo truck, each panel twelve feet high and twenty feet long — which was precisely the size of a wall of one of the single-story platform houses that comprised a sizable portion of the fake village.
The striking workers had not slept away the morning, after all. Instead, they had scouted barns, sheds, stables, and outbuildings which were firmly constructed, dismantling some of these and cutting them into maneuverable sections. They had taken only tightly joined panels that could pass as the walls of houses and churches. A passable exterior was all that mattered, for the insides of the fake houses would not be plastered or finished in any way. And after cutting up a barn, they had enough walls for seven or eight single-story platform buildings. A stable might build half a convent. A milk house could be sawed up and put back together as a two-story nuns' residence.
“It will save an incredible amount of time,” Maurice told Kelly as the major inspected the walls stacked in the back of the truck. “One of the most time-consuming jobs is putting the siding on the buildings. Now, we can nail it up in huge pieces.”
Kelly was not so sure. “No matter how well built a barn is, the wall is only a single thickness of wood. Some of the boards are not going to meet perfectly. Light will escape through them. Anyone looking at a fake house, made from these panels, will see light showing through the slats and know that it's a phony.”
“Then no one must light a lantern inside any house but the rectory — and the church,” Maurice said. “Your men must pass the night in darkness.”
“They haven't much choice,” Kelly said.
Though the individual partitions were heavy, there was plenty of sweaty, dirty, grunting, fear-driven manpower to cope with them. Twenty men wrestled each monstrous twelve-by-twenty wall from the bed of the German truck, and balanced it between them with considerable shouting and staggering back and forth.
“For God's sake don't drop it!” Private Fark screamed, as he took the front position on one of the walls. “It'll kill us if we lose control!”
With sunbrowned muscles bulging and sweat running in salty streams, with grunting and cursing that would have embarrassed many of the hard-working Frenchwomen if they had understood it, the walls were moved from the truck and toted to various platform houses which were now framed but not yet sided. The walls were balanced precariously against the frames of the platform houses, again by sheer muscle power, and the carpenters went to work nailing the panels to the beams which had been waiting since yesterday. Twenty long nails across the top, one every foot, then the same ratio down both sides, hammers smacking loudly, a chorus of blows echoing across the camp. When the straining, sweat-slimed men let go of the wall, the carpenters scurried along the base, praying that the thing would not rip loose and collapse on them, and they nailed that edge down as well. Then, while Maurice went for another load and while the majority of the husky laborers went to other tasks — of which there were many — the carpenters resecured the walls, pounding in again as many nails, one exactly between each pair they had already placed. At the corners of the building, where the prefabricated panels often did not meet in perfect eye- pleasing harmony — and where, in fact, there was sometimes as much as a two-inch gap despite the cut-to-order nature of the materials — the carpenters nailed up vertical finishing boards from foundation to eaves; these ran perpendicular to the horizontally slatted ex-barn-walls and provided the one-story structures with a surprisingly well-constructed appearance.
“And appearances are all that matter,” Major Kelly told Lieutenant Beame as they inspected the first prefabricated building to be finished. “The krauts won't be going into any of these places. Just the rectory. Maybe the church, if any of them are Catholics.”
“But the church and the rectory will be
“Never.” It was the most positive reply Kelly had in him.
And yet the afternoon went fairly well, so far as the other men were concerned. A great deal was accomplished. The ten-foot-square entrance foyer of the convent — into which the Germans might venture, though no farther — was framed and walled, even though the convent's larger outer walls had not yet been thrown up. A few outhouses were completed and roofed. “You call yourselves members of the Army engineers?” Kelly screamed at his men. “It takes you two hours to build a goddamned shithouse? Faster! Faster, damn you!” The rectory walls crept toward a nonexistent second-story roof, these not prefabricated but crafted with care; and between the porch posts the floor of the rectory's veranda took shape, and the stoop in front of it and the steps leading down from the stoop and the sturdy banisters on both sides of the steps. “Three and a half days!” Kelly screamed at the men working the rectory job. “That's all you have. Not a month!” The town's small church, built on low stone walls similar to those that would give the convent the air of permanence it needed, was framed from foyer to auditorium to sanctuary to sacristy, complete with an eighteen-foot bell tower in which there would not be any bell. Hopefully, the Germans would not notice this omission, arriving as they were in darkness and leaving in the early morning light. A few picket fences were set up around small lawns. And off the street behind the convent, four men worked hard on an old-fashioned stone well complete with its peaked roof, winch bar — but no bucket attached. An isolated religious community would have a few open wells. But who was to say these must function after so many years? This was a dry well. Principally, it was a dry well because the distance between the top of the well wall and the bottom of the pit was six feet, and half of that aboveground. This well could never draw water. But it looked as if it once had. And appearances, as Kelly kept telling his men, were all that mattered. Throughout the afternoon, then, the fake community went as the stone well went: smoothly, steadily, with much sweating, cursing, scraped hands, torn fingernails, cuts, bruises, tortured muscles, suspected hernias, known hernias, and exhaustion. Very little of what they built could be used, but it all looked as if it had been lived in for decades.
Therefore, Kelly should have been happy.
But he distrusted happiness. He forced himself to scowl all through the long, hot afternoon.
He was still scowling at suppertime. He stood by the mess tent at the southern end of the camp, eating a boiled-potato sandwich (with mustard) and scowling at the other men who were hastily consuming creamed chipped beef on toast and cling peaches. He ruined many good appetites.
“Why are you so depressed?” Lyle Park asked. “Those prefab walls are doing the trick. The work is coming along well.”
Before the major could tell Park about Kowalski's latest prediction, they were interrupted by Lieutenant Slade. Shouting and waving, Slade ran along the tent row, leaping gracelessly over guide ropes and pegs, dodging the men who were sitting before their tents eating supper. The men tried to trip Slade, but he was too quick and watchful for them to succeed. He stopped at the mess tent and unconsciously saluted Major Kelly. “Urgent message, sir! Call from General Blade!”
“Blade's on the radio now?” Kelly asked, around a mouthful of bread and boiled potatoes.
“It's about the Panzers,” Slade said.
Kelly paled. “What about the Panzers?”
“I don't know,” Slade said. “That's what the general wants to talk about.”
Slade appeared to be sincere. Kelly had not overlooked the possibility that Slade was engaged in some elaborate hoax designed to make a fool of his superior officer. Slade would want to get even for yesterday, for the things that the major had shouted at him. But right now, Slade was sincere. He seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, that he hated Kelly. His awe of General Blade was not faked; that old syphilitic bastard must really be on the shortwave set.
Kelly dropped his mess tin and ran. None of the men in front of the tents tried to trip him, but they worked hard to get Slade who ran close behind. Again, they failed.
Since the HQ building had been torn down to make way for the fake community, the radio was being sheltered in Slade's tent, the only tent other than Major Kelly's which was roomy enough to hold the monster and the square wooden table on which it stood. Major Kelly stooped and entered the gloomy canvas room. The place smelled of wet straw and a few dozen mice. Since neither seemed to be present, Kelly supposed that both odors were endemic to the lieutenant. Wrinkling his nose, he went quickly to the radio and picked up the microphone just as Slade entered the tent behind him.
“Kelly here, sir,” the major said, voice heavy with dread.
“Kelly?” Blade asked, unnecessarily.
