with some enlisted men. Rumors said that the Nazis had massacred all the French officers. Monique thought it was likely, and said that this left her with a small child who had never seen his father. He was being cared for by an elderly aunt while Monique went to work.
At the sound of shouts and screams, the two women rushed outside. A local gendarme was herding six distraught young women in their late teens and early twenties, and only half protecting them from a larger group of outraged and mainly older village women. The six younger women had been stripped to their underwear, were bruised about the head and shoulders, and their hair had been roughly hacked or shaved off. Blood from cuts and slashes was beginning to scab on their scalps. Their faces were bruised, apparently from being punched. The young women might have been pretty once, but the looks of terror, the bruises, and the blood denied that.
“Whores!” women in the crowd screamed and chanted, shoveling and jostling the six. The gendarme pushed one villager aside when it looked like she was going to hit one of the prisoners with an umbrella. Slaps and kicks were all right, but no umbrellas. A hand reached out and tore at a woman’s slip, exposing her breasts to the jeers of the crowd. The gendarme shrugged and grinned.
“Collaborators, aren’t they?” Jessica asked.
“They slept with the German soldiers and now they pay for it. The losers always pay, don’t they?”
Jessica hadn’t quite thought of it that way. “Why would they ever want to sleep with the Germans?”
Monique shrugged. “For the young ones, perhaps it was for love and adventure. There were very few young men left here thanks to the war, so a German soldier might have seemed attractive to a lonely young woman. After all, hadn’t the Germans won? And weren’t they going to be in charge here for a thousand years? For others, perhaps they screwed for the food that the German soldier had access to. There was never enough food provided by the Vichy government. Who knows? Maybe they really are whores and they did it for the money. Regardless, their side lost and they must now pay for being on the wrong side.”
Monique spat on the ground to emphasize her point. One of the young women had fallen and the crowd began kicking and jabbing at her while she crawled on bloody knees. It reminded Jessica of a scene from the Crucifixion. But these were French women condemned of whoring with the enemy, not Jesus.
“But this is awful.”
“Don’t judge. What do you think will happen to me if the Boche come back and the villagers suddenly decide that the Germans are their saviors?”
Jessica blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“Jessica, I have a little boy and what I make working with you isn’t enough. Meanwhile there are vast mountains of supplies that well-meaning and helpful American soldiers can get to those willing to pay the old fashioned price.”
Jessica was shocked. “What are you telling me, Monique?”
“I have an American master sergeant who takes care of me and my son. I found him a couple of days after the Americans arrived. His name is Boyle and he has a wife and two children back in Oklahoma, wherever that is, but I’m here and she’s not.”
“And when your husband comes back?”
“Don’t you mean if? I haven’t heard from him in three years. I don’t think he’s alive and, if he is and does return, we will work it out. I will do what I need to for my child, and my husband will understand that or he will move on.”
“Did you ever sleep with a German for food?” Jessica asked, not quite wanting to hear the answer.
“I was never that hungry, although I came close on a few occasions.” She shook her head sadly. “I did have sex with the grocer a few times, though. He’s an old man and, except for him, it wasn’t very satisfying, but my son and I did have food.”
The mob had pushed the six women towards the city limits. “Now what will happen to them?” Jessica asked.
“They will be turned loose outside the city to fend for themselves.”
“How?”
Monique laughed. “Well, they are whores, aren’t they?”
Below the slow-flying Piper Cub, a German rear guard detachment was pulling out after once more stalling and mauling the 74th’s advance. The key position had been a two-story stone farmhouse. Artillery called in by Morgan had eventually obliterated it. The French had built well, and it had taken numerous hits before the burning roof had collapsed on the defenders.
A small column of German vehicles, several towing antitank guns, had then quickly limbered up and moved down the dirt road towards the west and the safety of another prepared position. They left behind two more burning Sherman tanks, along with dead and wounded crewmen. The continuing insolence and the success of the Germans infuriated the Americans and there had been a couple more incidents where Nazi prisoners had been shot. Morgan couldn’t blame the men on the ground. Like the sniper, it was hard to let a man who’d just shot and killed your friends get away with it by saying, “I surrender and would like now to go to a camp where I’ll be fed and warm while you go and try not to get killed by my buddies.”
Prisoner shooting, he concluded was an ugly but understandable fact of war, and one of those things nobody ever talked about.
Jack had called in artillery fire that had, as usual, missed the fleeing column by a wide margin. He’d then been informed that, as usual, no fighter-bombers were in the area. He’d sworn at the Germans’ good luck, and been willing to let the krauts depart until a machine gun in the tail-end truck opened fire on him, spitting a column of tracers in the air.
“Captain, that silly bastard’s shooting at us.”
“I can tell, Snyder.” He banked and twisted the Cub until the German gave up.
Enough of this shit, he thought. The tail vehicle was a Horch heavy all-terrain standard personnel vehicle. This one looked like it carried half a dozen German soldiers and was towing an antitank gun, although not one of the hated 88’s.
As he drew closer, the machine gun erupted again, but the Cub’s agility enabled Jack to evade the stream of bullets.
“Sir, what the hell are you doing?” Snyder yelled as Jack dropped even lower and lined up behind the Horch.
“I’m pissed off, Snyder.”
“Aw shit, Captain.”
“I had this little plane armed for a reason and this is it. Hang on.”
He dropped the plane to mere feet above the road, closing at more than twenty miles an hour faster than the big truck. Again, he juked and jigged while the gunner, in the front of the truck, futilely tried to swivel and find him.
At two hundred yards, he pulled the trigger and the twin thirties erupted, hitting the ground behind the Horch. He walked the bullets up to the truck and raked it. The truck swerved off the road and rolled down a ditch. Several men tumbled out and ran off. Jack was elated to see that not all the Germans had left the truck. He was about to make a second pass when the truck’s gas tank exploded. The other German vehicles had halted to protect their comrade and began to shoot at him. Jack decided it was time to go home.
“Jesus, sir, that was one helluva trick. Do me a favor though, and please don’t do it again. Mama Snyder wants me back home again.”
“Don’t worry, I think I’ve got it all out of my system. I like to think I’m brave, not suicidal. When we land, you’ve got one job to do?”
Snyder grinned. “Let me guess, sir. You want a silhouette of a truck painted on the side of the plane, don’t you?”
That evening, Levin and Carter went looking for Morgan and found him sitting against a tree. The expression
