War Stories Read online

  Late afternoon found the Firestones at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. Dad seemed especially solemn as they walked among the endless rows of immaculate white crosses and the occasional Star of David.

  “Makes you think, huh?” Daniel Firestone said to his son. “Battles may look glamorous in movies and on posters, but this is what’s left over once the smoke clears away.”

  “They were all heroes,” Trevor said reverently.

  “They were kids,” Dad amended. “Not much older than you, when you think about it. Every single one of these graves is more than a life lost. It’s a family torn apart and generations that will never be born. Look at your great-grandfather. If he’d been killed in the war, neither of us would be standing here right now. Not to mention your kids, and their kids, and so on. That’s what war’s really about—pointless destruction.”

  “It wasn’t pointless to save the world from Hitler,” Trevor argued.

  Dad sighed. “That’s just it. We just go from war to war to war. We never seem to learn. Hitler was one of the worst, but there’s always someone who wants to take over. Why is it so hard to understand that we have to find a way to live together?”

  Trevor turned his attention to his great-grandfather, who was wandering among the markers, reading names as if searching for anyone he might have known.

  “You think he’s looking for Freddie?” Trevor mused. “Maybe I should show him how to use the computer to find someone. You know how he feels about ‘newfangled gadgets.’ ”

  “Maybe we should just let him wander,” Dad replied thoughtfully. “This whole Normandy visit has been hard on him emotionally.”

  Trevor didn’t reply, but he couldn’t have disagreed more. Dad just didn’t get it. Sure, G.G. lost friends on D-Day—especially Freddie—and he was sad about that. But being a part of Operation Overlord was the greatest accomplishment in the old man’s life. The way G.G. had taken out that machine-gun nest on Omaha Beach was the coolest thing Trevor had ever heard of outside of a video game. And that wasn’t even what he was in France to be honored for. Trevor couldn’t wait to hear the full story of how Bravo Company had liberated Sainte-Régine. It was going to be epic!

  G.G. bent close to a marker to read the inscription. Trevor blinked. As the old man ducked down, he revealed a slight figure a few rows past him. It was the blond girl! She must have been here with her family, visiting the same handful of Normandy attractions. Only—considering their paths had been crisscrossing all day, he couldn’t remember seeing any parents with her.

  Eventually, G.G. rejoined them. “I found Freddie,” he reported matter-of-factly. “I suppose this is as good a place for him as any.”

  They returned to the rental car, anxious to get back to their hotel in Cherbourg before dark.

  “Hey—” Trevor nodded in the direction of the Citroën. “What’s that?”

  There on the windshield lay a bundle of gray feathers. Dad picked it up. It was a dead bird, its eyes glassy, its tiny feet hanging limp.

  “Our luck,” G.G. put in. “It had to land on our car.”

  “Poor little guy.” Dad walked over to the side of the road and placed the bird on some soft grass.

  Trevor said nothing. But if the bird had simply died and fallen on the car by sheer random chance, why had it been held in place by one of the Citroën’s windshield wipers?

  It was like driving through a tunnel, dark and dingy, even on a bright, sunny day. The fields of Normandy were all bordered by hedgerows instead of fences. The hedges—planted on raised berms to begin with—were so dense and so high that the tops of the trees met in a canopy over the narrow two-lane road that had once been paved … maybe.

  Clutching the wheel with white knuckles, Dad struggled to navigate via a phone that kept losing touch with the GPS. When they met another car coming in the opposite direction, it was a nerve-racking squeeze.

  “Tell me again why we came this way,” he said through clenched teeth. “There are perfectly good roads all over France. Why are we on this one?”

  “Trevor wanted to see where I was during the war,” G.G. replied. “This is it.”

  “On this road?” Trevor asked.

  “Hedgerow country,” the old soldier explained. “There’s nothing quite like it anywhere else in the world.”

  Trevor looked around. “What’s so special about the woods?”

  “Pull over,” G.G. ordered his grandson.

  “What—here?”

  Impatiently, the old man reached down and yanked up the Citroën’s parking brake. With a screech, the car fishtailed to a halt.

  “Grandpa!” Dad exclaimed. “You can’t just—”

  G.G. swung his long legs out the door, climbed up the berm, and, before their horrified eyes, began ramming himself through the dense foliage. In a few gargantuan efforts, he had vanished.

  “Awesome!” Trevor ran up the earthen boundary and tried to bull his way through the vegetation where he’d seen his great-grandfather disappear. It wasn’t like any bush he’d ever encountered. The hedgerow consisted of shrubs and trees that had been growing there for centuries. Some of the trunks were the thickness of a person’s waist or even larger.

  “Trevor! Grandpa!” Dad’s agitated voice rang out.

  A hand reached back through the greenery, grasped Trevor by the arm, and hauled him through. A branch scraped painfully across his face as he joined G.G. on the other side. He was in a field about the size of a football gridiron, but oddly shaped, with angles nowhere near ninety degrees. It was freshly plowed and ready for planting, bound on all sides by the towering, overgrown hedgerows.

  “You guys, where are you?” came a plaintive voice through the shrubbery. A moment later, the leaves parted and Dad burst through. He rolled down the berm and landed at their feet.

  Trevor helped his father back up. “How’d you know about this place, G.G.?”

  “Know it? I crawled through most of it. This part of the world is so old that they’ve been growing their own fences since time began. Fighting in this stuff was one of the biggest miscalculations of the whole war. We were supposed to be out of hedgerow country in a day. You know how long it took? More than two weeks.”

  Trevor was mystified. “Why?”

  G.G. indicated the dense growth all around them. “These hedgerows—they may look pretty in the aerial photographs, but they’re murder for fighting. You can’t drive a tank through them!”

  “I thought you can drive a tank through anything,” Trevor protested. “In video games, you can drive a tank through a brick wall.”

  “This stuff is stronger than a brick wall. Not to mention that the place is paradise for a defending army to dig in. A single gun emplacement on one of these berms could hold off a division. And if by some miracle you get through that, there’s another hedgerow across the next field. According to the army, this place averages fourteen hedgerows per kilometer. And the generals couldn’t understand why we were making such slow progress.”

  “Messieurs, messieurs!” A middle-aged man slipped through the hedge with ease and skill, like an old pro. Over one arm he carried a wicker basket.

  He approached G.G. “Américain?” he asked, then translated himself. “You are American?”

  G.G. nodded. “How’d you know?”

  “Ah.” The Frenchman nodded back. “A man your age, visiting these fields. You were once a soldier here, n’est-ce pas?”

  The old man stuck out his hand. “Jacob Firestone.”

  The farmer clutched it in both fists and shook it emotionally. “It is my honor to have you on my farm, monsieur. My grand-père often spoke of the American heroes who came to free our land.” He pulled the basket from his shoulder. “A gift for you—un cadeau. You must be hungry. Please enjoy. And thank you one time more.”

  “Wow, G.G.,” Trevor whispered as the farmer magically disappeared into his hedge. “Were all the French this grateful?”

  “Not always,” the old soldier admitted. “Lik
e when we had to shell the Germans out of their towns. Sometimes there wasn’t much town left to liberate.”

  Dad was the practical one. “Let’s see what’s in the basket. I’m starving!”

  The farmer’s gift turned out to be a picnic lunch of crusty French bread, a slab of fresh cheese, and bottles of cool spring water. In no time at all, they were perched atop the berm, chowing down and loving it.

  Munching contentedly, Trevor peered over his shoulder through the foliage of the hedge into the next field. He closed his eyes and tried to picture Bravo Company in 1944 slogging through these endless hedgerows, never knowing when their deadly enemy might be waiting on the other side.

  “The tank’s stuck.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Jacob mumbled around a piece of chocolate from his field rations. “Tanks don’t get stuck.”

  Beau grabbed him by the collar and hauled him upright. “Look!”

  A Sherman tank was halfway up the berm, grinding and groaning, making no progress against the thick trunks of the hedge at the top. Soldiers ran for cover as the spinning treads kicked up a blizzard of mud, dirt, and torn roots. Several cows looked on, unimpressed by the presence of soldiers, heavy weapons, and even tanks in their pasture. Normandy must be dairy country, because there seemed to be cows everywhere. How the farmers managed to get their cattle through the hedges to be milked was something the US Army never quite figured out. Where could a cow go that a tank couldn’t? It was just another baffling aspect of a very baffling war.

  “Back it down!” bellowed Sergeant Rajinsky, who had taken over the platoon until the wounded Lieutenant McCoy was able to return to duty.

  The Sherman retreated down the berm, veered about ten meters to the left, and tried to break through at a different spot. It was another no-go.

  “They say First Infantry has spear-shaped plow attachments for their Shermans that cut right through the hedgerows,” Leland put in. “Why can’t we get that?”

  “Why?” Jacob said disgustedly. “It’s the army. When’s the last time they did something that made sense? A whole continent to invade, and they picked here.”

  It was the kind of complaining that had characterized their training since Fort Benning. But now, at D-Day plus eight, it had taken on a bitter undertone. Bravo Company was down to barely 120 men. Of the casualties, 28 had been killed. It was not lost on Jacob, Beau, and Leland that a few days ago, their friend Freddie would have been a part of this conversation, bellyaching as loud as any of them.

  Eventually, half the platoon was involved in a spirited debate on how to get through the hedge. Rajinsky decided to use the tank to blow an opening for itself into the next field.

  “Won’t that tell the Germans we’re coming?” Leland queried.

  “I think they figured that out,” Jacob put in. “On D-Day.”

  “If there are Germans around here,” Rajinsky concluded, “they’ve already heard us. Shermans don’t have mufflers, you know.”

  So the tank fired two rounds directly into the top of the berm, opening up a gap about twelve feet wide. Instantly, a hail of machine-gun fire came sizzling through the breach, beating a drum solo on the tank’s armor, sending bullets ricocheting in all directions. A fragment struck a glancing blow on Jacob’s helmet, and he dropped to the grass, dazed.

  “High School!” Beau raced to his side. “You hit?”

  “Just got my bell rung,” Jacob managed. He glanced up into the black-and-white face of a mildly interested cow. “What are you looking at, Elsie?”

  Beau heaved a sigh of relief. “I’m definitely sticking with you. You’ve got nine lives!”

  The Sherman rolled over what was left of the berm and through the gap, the platoon advancing cautiously behind it. They could see no Germans firing at them, but they fired back anyway, peppering the far hedge with a deadly barrage. The tank blasted away, toppling tree trunks and pulverizing the next berm. More explosions came from a mortar emplacement two fields back, raining shells down onto the enemy positions. The sound was a never-ending roar of ratatat punctuated by boom.

  The troops fanned out to the edges of the field, squatting as deep into the hedges as they could insert themselves. They’d gotten good at this kind of fighting, but Jacob never got used to it. Every now and then a handful of men would duck out of their hiding places, advance a few feet, and duck back in again. They dared go no farther at any one time. Their priority was to keep the Germans pinned down so they couldn’t take aim. But one look at the bullet holes perforating the surrounding trees was enough to convince Jacob that the reason he was still alive was sheer random chance. Or perhaps fate. Maybe today just wasn’t his day to die.

  Jacob blinked. The sun peeked out from behind a cloud, glinting off something smooth and black at the base of the berm. The enemy sometimes tunneled into the mounds from behind, exposing only the muzzles of their machine guns.

  “MG!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, shooting at the spot with his rifle. Bullets ripped into the earth and roots of the berm, but the muzzle continued to spit flame. How could he reach an enemy who was protected by inches of ancient dirt and woody roots?

  The tank supplied the answer. It slammed a shell into the gun dead-on. The muzzle vanished, along with most of the berm, and the shrubs and trees growing out of it.

  The combat raged on. Bravo Company had the advantage, but the enemy made them bleed for every inch they took. The Germans had been in Normandy for years, and knew exactly how to defend hedgerow country. Men fell, picked off by sniper and machine-gun fire.

  Everyone was bathed in sweat and covered in mud, foliage, and wood chips when Rajinsky radioed to end the mortar barrage and signaled his men to cease firing. The battle was over—at least for this field. There was a virtually identical field just beyond what was left of the hedge, and another one beyond that. And so on, and so on.

  Bravo had lost two men. Seven others were wounded.

  This time, the Sherman had no trouble finding a place to drive over the hedgerow. It had opened several suitable spots during the course of the fighting.

  It was only after crossing to the next field that the platoon met their enemies—in a manner of speaking. Their lifeless bodies were strewn across the trenches they had dug on the opposite side of the berm. A few slumped in foxholes.

  Rajinsky did a quick head count and came up short. “Not enough,” he reported. “You know what that means.”

  Jacob nodded. “They’ll be waiting for us in the next field.”

  “Or the one after that,” Beau added grimly.

  That was the thing about the hedgerows, Jacob reflected. You felt like you were wandering through an endless labyrinth, and every time you fought through a new opening, a new wall blocked your way.

  But it was worse than that. At least in a labyrinth, nobody was shooting at you.

  “You’ve been quiet, Trev,” Daniel Firestone tossed over his shoulder as he drove the rental car south through the Normandy countryside toward the town of Saint-Lô.

  Trevor couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something had been bugging him ever since their picnic lunch. “I’m okay,” he said vaguely, sounding not okay at all.

  G.G. was not fooled. “Out with it, kid. What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s that battle of the hedgerows you talked about.” Trevor struggled to put his feelings into words. “I get that it happened and all that. But it just doesn’t sound, you know, war enough.”

  The old soldier laughed mirthlessly. “Let me assure you it was war enough. For a lot of good men, it was too much war. They never came home from bocage country.”

  “Yeah, I understand that,” Trevor conceded. “But shooting at an enemy you can’t see. Using a tank to blow up bushes. Fighting one field at a time with a few dozen guys. I mean, a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers landed on D-Day and more were coming every minute. Where were they all?”

  “They were in their own fields, trying to get their own tanks unstuck,” G.G. replied
reasonably. He motioned out the window at the passing scenery. “I’m sure you noticed that they never run out of fields around here.”

  “I guess,” Trevor admitted. “But it just seems wrong. In video games, war is huge crazy battles, with ginormous explosions and everybody fighting full-on.”

  “Maybe somebody should have pointed out to you,” Dad put in sarcastically, “that video games aren’t the same as real life. Oh, wait. Somebody tried to. But you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “The battles were every bit as big as your video games,” G.G. assured his great-grandson. “But when you’re in the middle of it, it’s personal and small. Your job is all that matters. The covering fire you have to lay down. The foxhole you have to dig. The fifty meters you have to run to make it to where you’re supposed to be. You’re one tiny pawn in a giant chess game, but you’re important too. If you don’t achieve your little objective, the whole plan could fall apart.”

  “Even when your job is a field of cows?” Trevor asked dubiously.

  “Forget the cows. They were just civilians. Look, we’re coming up on Saint-Lô. That was the center of Operation Cobra, which was the turning point of the whole invasion.”

  “Now, that’s more like it,” Trevor said approvingly.

  “It was a huge operation,” the old man went on, “but every soldier still fought his own war. We did our job so General Patton’s Third Army could break out of Normandy and roll across France. And we couldn’t have managed that if the Canadians and the Brits hadn’t been keeping half the German units pinned down to the north in Caen. And remember, all those armies were just hundreds of thousands of regular fellows like me, each with his own little assignment.”