Hanging on

Now was almost time. He had very little reconnaissance left to do. He had noted each sentry, had discovered the weak points in the German positions. He was almost ready to lead a silent attack. In half an hour, he could go find Major Kelly and kill him. And then make heroes out of this whole pack of cowards.

3

Hiding in shadows, crawling on their bellies, running tiptoe from one tree to the next and from one building to the next, Major Kelly and Lieutenant Beame went all over the village looking for Lieutenant Slade. They stopped in at every house, school, and nunnery, hoping that someone would have seen Slade during the night and could shed light on The Snot's intentions.

But no one had seen him since early in the evening. Not that anyone had been looking for him.

“You try not to notice The Snot,” Lyle Fark told them as they stood with him and seven other men in one of the hollow two-story houses. “I mean, you don't want to know what he's doing, most of the time. But when he isn't there, you notice it right away. Everything's so tranquil. You get such a sense of well-being when he goes away.”

“And when did you get this sense of well-being?” Kelly asked.

“Early this evening,” Fark said. “Yeah, he must have disappeared around eight o'clock, because things seemed to pick up about then.”

It was the same answer they got from everyone. Slade had not been seen for several hours; but although they could just about pinpoint the time of his departure, they could not discover where he had gone.

Shortly after two in the morning, they slipped past the sentry at the bridge road and A Street and crawled over to the hospital bunker steps. A one-story house had been thrown up atop the hospital. It was like most of the other fake houses, except that it had outside steps into the cellar. The steps, of course, lead into the bunker where Tooley, Kowalski, Liverwright, and Hagendorf were holed up for the duration. At the bottom of the steps, Major Kelly stood up and softly rapped out shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits on the wooden cellar door.

A minute passed. Slowly.

Down by the river, frogs were singing.

Another minute passed. Slower than the first.

“Come on, Tooley,” Beame whispered. They were somewhat exposed on the steps, good targets for a Wehrmacht sharpshooter.

Kelly rapped on the door again. Even before he finished the tune, the portal scraped open a fraction of an inch, like the entrance to a crypt controlled by demonic forces.

“It's me, Tooley. Major Kelly.”

“Whew!” the pacifist said. “I thought it was a German.” He stepped out of the way, let them in. He was invisible in that lightless chamber.

When the door was closed again, Tooley switched on a flashlight, confident that none of its glow would escape the subterranean room. Liverwright, holding his wounded hip, loomed out of the darkness. And so did Maurice.

“What are you doing here?” Major Kelly asked.

“Dying,” Liverwright said.

“Not you,” Kelly said. “Maurice, you're supposed to stay away from here. You told me you didn't dare show your face around General Rotenhausen.”

Maurice nodded. “And I pray I will not have to.” His face glistened in the flashlight's glow.

“We have big trouble, sir,” Private Tooley said.

“Then you know about Slade?”

“Bigger trouble than that.” The pacifist sounded as if he were on the brink of tears. “Blood's going to be spilled.”

“Bigger trouble than Slade running around loose?” Kelley asked. He felt as if he might vomit.

Maurice moved forward, commanding attention with his hefty stomach and his low, tense voice. “Two hours ago, one of my contacts came from the west to tell me that an Allied tank division has broken through the German lines and is rolling rapidly your way. I have checked it out myself. The Allies are driving hard to capture this bridge of yours.”

“Ah…” Major Kelly said. He wished that he had been born without his legs. If he had been a cripple since birth, he would never have been drafted. He would be at home right now, back in the States, reading pulp magazines and listening to radio and having his mother wheel him to the movies. How nice. Why hadn't he ever before realized the wonderful life a cripple could have?

“Allied tanks?” Lieutenant Beame asked. “But this is no trouble! Don't you see? Our own people are on the way. We're saved!”

Maurice looked at Kelly. “There's another good reason for him to stay away from my daughter. I won't have her marry a stupid man.”

“What do you mean?” Beame asked, baffled. “Aren't we saved?”

“I'm afraid not,” Maurice said.

“Well, when are the Allied tanks getting here?” Beame asked.

“They ought to arrive before the Panzers start across the bridge from this side,” Maurice said. He looked knowingly at Kelly. “By dawn or shortly thereafter, Major.”

“Even better!” Beame said. “I don't understand why you're unhappy.”

Major Kelly sighed and rubbed his eyes with one fist. Maybe if he had been born with only one hand he could have avoided this mess. He would not have had to be really seriously crippled to stay out of the Army. “Think about it for a minute, Beame. In a couple of hours, you're going to have Allied tanks on the west bank of the river— and German tanks on the east bank. The Allies will control the land over there, and the Germans will control St. Ignatius. Neither the Allies nor the Germans are going to permit the enemy to cross that bridge.”

“Stalemate!” Beame said, smiling at Maurice, Tooley, Liverwright, then at Kelly, gradually losing the smile as he went from one face to the next. “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God, there's going to be a tank battle for the bridge!”

“Sure,” Kelly said. “They'll sit on opposite shores and shoot at each other. And we'll be right in the middle.”

Beame looked as if he were going to be sick on his own shoes.

“Don't be sick on your own shoes,” Kelly said. “I couldn't stand that right now.”

“Look,” Beame said, “we don't have to wait around for this battle. We can slip away into the woods until it's over.”

“Two hundred of us?” Kelly and Maurice exchanged a grim smile. “Even with darkness on our side, we've had trouble moving around town. That was just two of us. With two hundred — no chance.”

Despite the changes which had taken place in him recently, Beame was much the same as he had always been: naive, full of hope. “Well… what if we sent someone west to meet these Allied tanks before they got here? If we told them that the Panzers were here, maybe we could persuade them to let the Germans cross and hold the battle elsewhere.”

“This they will not do,” Maurice said. “For one thing, the Allied tank commander would know that the Germans will blow up the bridge after themselves. They almost always do these days. And the Allies wouldn't want to lose the bridge.”

“We can build them another bridge in a day!” Beame said.

Tooley nodded eagerly. “That's true.”

“You forget that only Blade knows we're here,” Kelly said. “The commander of those Allied tanks doesn't suspect there's a unit of engineers and laborers stranded behind the lines. Although, I suppose we could tell them… ”

Maurice shook his head sadly. “No good, mon ami. If it were any other Allied