War Stories Read online

  “And what was your assignment, G.G.?” Trevor probed.

  “Mostly trying not to get blown up. The air corps bombed us by mistake. Or maybe we were in the wrong place. Who knows? But let me tell you, it doesn’t feel like friendly fire when it’s coming down on your head. And those flyboys—they can’t hear what you’re yelling up at them. Good thing too, or they would have bombed us twice as hard.”

  “Here’s Saint-Lô now.” Dad pointed to a sign as the Citroën drove by.

  “Wait—” Trevor was astonished. “We’re here already? This is the place it took you two months of fighting to get to?”

  G.G. shrugged. “We weren’t dawdling. The Germans were real stingy about what they’d let us have. That’s why they call it a war. There are two sides. We found out later that the order came from Hitler himself to defend Normandy to the last man. I give them credit. They pretty much did that—until Saint-Lô.”

  Trevor wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but Saint-Lô looked more like a small bustling city than the village among the hedgerows his great-grandfather had described. The downtown was dominated by a cathedral called Notre-Dame de Saint-Lô, surrounded by neighborhoods of modern buildings and streets of shops.

  That was the thing—it all seemed new, or at least newish. “G.G., I thought you said the towns in Normandy were really old.”

  “They must have done a lot of rebuilding,” his great-grandfather concluded. “Because when we left it, it was flat as a pancake.”

  “This is a perfect example of the destructive power of war,” Dad added from the driver’s seat. “I’ll bet the people of Saint-Lô didn’t ask to have their town at the flashpoint of a giant war.”

  “They should have been happy,” Trevor argued. “They were liberated from the Nazis! Right, G.G.?”

  The old man’s gaze turned far away as he remembered. “They were—sort of. We freed the place—what was left of it. But they were the ones who had to rebuild pretty much from the Stone Age.”

  “Can you imagine that happening to Marlborough?” Dad put in.

  Trevor tried to picture his own hometown bombed to rubble, but the image just wouldn’t come. Marlborough had always been there. And in his mind, it always would be. Then again, the kids in Saint-Lô had probably thought the same thing.

  “Yeah, but think how much time we’d get off school,” he shot back. “They close every time it snows.”

  That drew an appreciative laugh from his great-grandfather. “Good one, kid! Always look on the bright side!”

  The Hôtel de Petites Fleurs was located just a couple of blocks from the cathedral on a broad avenue of shops, restaurants, and cafés. The hotel was smaller than where they’d stayed in Cherbourg, but the clientele was similar. A lot of the guests sitting around the lobby were men about G.G.’s age. It had been three-quarters of a century, yet the war still cast its shadow over France. These people were probably on the same pilgrimage as the Firestones. They and their families were retracing their steps from the D-Day beaches across Europe. Some of them wore hats bearing the insignia of legendary fighting units like the American Big Red One or the British Twenty-First Army Group. Eventually, they would disperse as they followed their various units into the heart of Europe. But here in Normandy, they were close together. For Trevor it was an eye-opener. The scope of the fighting force that had landed in France in 1944 was practically too vast to contemplate. How General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, had managed to keep track of it all was a miracle.

  Up in their suite, while the old soldier settled himself down for a nap, Trevor used his phone to call up pictures of Saint-Lô from before the war. He stalked from window to window, trying to match the view to the old photographs. Except for the cathedral, there was nothing recognizable. How had G.G. described it? Flat as a pancake. It really must have been. In video games, your own air raids and artillery barrages always seemed okay. But they knocked down buildings and ruined cities every bit as mercilessly as the enemy’s firepower.

  Dad reclined in an armchair, scrolling through Facebook. For a guy who always complained that Trevor spent too much time online, he’d certainly become obsessed with social media ever since this trip had started. Maybe he was searching for a good restaurant for tonight’s dinner. There were probably a lot of options now that Saint-Lô had turned into such a tourist town.

  Trevor was at the glass again, trying to line up rue du Belle with the image on his phone, when he spied her. She was looking up at the hotel from window to window when her eyes met his.

  It was the blond girl from Omaha Beach. Trevor bristled. This was more than a coincidence. Why was she turning up everywhere the Firestones went?

  She stared at him for a long second, then broke away to hurry off down the street.

  Trevor ran for the door. “Be right back,” he tossed over his shoulder.

  Dad was mystified. “Where are you going?”

  But Trevor was already pounding down the hall. Not willing to wait for the elevator, he took the stairs three at a time and burst out the front door onto the street. At first, he couldn’t spot her in the crowded square. Then he caught a glimpse of her green hoodie, hurrying around a corner. Turning on the afterburners, he sprinted up behind her and touched her shoulder. “Hey—”

  With a gasp, she wheeled around. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t even a kid. It was a woman in her twenties with a nose ring and a face tattoo.

  “Sorry!” he stammered. “I thought you were somebody else.”

  She mumbled something in French and marched off.

  Trevor pivoted away, desperately scanning faces. How could she have disappeared so fast? He had to find her. It was the only way to get to the bottom of this.

  The sound of a car horn attracted his attention to the far end of the block. There she was, on the opposite side of the square, hurrying away.

  Trevor began to push his way in her direction, calling, “Come back!”

  There were complaints from the people in his way. A few muttered, “Américains!”

  The blond girl never turned around, not even when he broke through the throng and shouted, “I just want to talk!”

  She definitely heard him. He could see her shoulders stiffen. But she increased her pace.

  At the next intersection, a motorcycle pulled up in front of her and stopped. She climbed aboard behind the driver, a slim male figure. She pulled on a helmet and they drove off. A few seconds later, they were out of sight.

  An older lady told him, in English, “Do not worry, young man. There will be other girls for you.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s—” How could he ever explain it? “Thanks,” he mumbled, starting back across the square.

  By the time he got to the hotel, both Dad and G.G. were waiting for him in the lobby.

  Dad looked like he was about to organize a search party. “What was that all about, Trev? Where did you go?”

  Even his normally unflappable great-grandfather was concerned. “You’re halfway around the world, mister. You can’t just go skylarking around town whenever it suits you.”

  “But this is serious!” Breathlessly, he told them about the girl, and how she’d been reappearing ever since Omaha Beach. “How is it that she turns up wherever we happen to be? It’s like she’s following us!”

  G.G. made a face. “Last time I was in France, there were a lot of blonds following me. They were called Germans and every single one of them was trying to kill me.”

  “I know it looks that way, but she’s not following you,” Dad explained patiently. “We’re just over a week away from the seventy-fifth anniversary of V-E Day. France is full of old soldiers and their families, all doing exactly what we’re doing.”

  “So don’t yell bingo in a crowded room,” G.G. chortled. “Not unless you want to start a riot.”

  “It can’t be a coincidence,” Trevor argued. “It’s not just that she’s everywhere. She’s looking at me. Just now she was staring directly into our room.”


  “Did it ever occur to you that she thinks you’re following her?” G.G. suggested. “You’re not the only one who can recognize a familiar face.”

  “I don’t mean to shoot down everything you say,” Dad told Trevor. “But it just doesn’t make sense. Why would this girl give two hoots about us? We’re tourists like everybody else—probably including her.”

  “What about that dead bird on our car?” Trevor challenged. “If that was a message, it wasn’t a very friendly one.”

  “Enough of this,” G.G. interrupted. “I’ve been to Saint-Lô twice, and it’s hard to say which visit had more fighting in it. Let’s go out and see this town. We leave for Paris in the morning.”

  They walked all around Saint-Lô and then toured the cathedral and its museum. Trevor was amazed by the before-and-after photographs showing the devastation of the Gothic cathedral. An entire stone tower had been knocked down by Allied bombs.

  “Don’t blame me,” G.G. whispered. “I wasn’t in the air corps. It’s a miracle they didn’t blow me up along with the church.”

  Dad was most interested in the architecture, art, and stained glass windows. He was determined to make this trip educational or die trying, but Trevor didn’t care about naves, apses, and vaulted ceilings. He had to admit, though, that the people of Saint-Lô had done a great job restoring a building that had been virtually reduced to rubble.

  Dad must have thought that was enough education for one day, because he let G.G. and Trevor outvote him on the traditional French restaurant and have pizza for dinner. But he insisted on ending the evening at an outdoor café, despite the old soldier’s opinion that “the coldest winter I ever spent in my life was the summer I spent in Normandy.” It was exactly that kind of night—chilly and damp, with a biting wind. They sat shivering in their jackets, trying to enjoy ice cream that was only slightly colder than the air.

  The next morning, the Firestones were up with the sunrise. Paris was almost three hundred kilometers away, and they were anxious to get an early start.

  They gathered up their luggage and headed for the parking lot.

  Somehow, their car looked different. Wrong. Out of balance.

  “The front’s too low,” Trevor observed.

  “Or the back’s too high,” G.G. added.

  When they reached the Citroën, the problem was obvious. Both front tires had been slashed. The vehicle leaned forward, resting on the rims.

  The three glanced around at the other vehicles in the lot. Theirs was the only one damaged.

  “Who would do such a thing?” Dad demanded.

  Trevor thought of the mysterious blond girl and her accomplice on the motorcycle.

  “Hey, Beau,” Jacob called over to his friend in the foxhole a few meters away. “Where in France are we?”

  “Doesn’t matter, High School,” came Beau’s reply. “You can’t give away anything about where you are. The censors will just black it out.”

  “Fine,” Jacob grumbled. “I’ll just tell them I’m working hard not to get run over by our own tanks.”

  “Uh-uh. Can’t say that either. Hitler might want to know what equipment we’ve got.”

  Jacob was disgusted. “Well, what can I say? Having a nice war; wish you were here?”

  Beau stuck his head out of his foxhole. “Will you shut up? I’m writing my own letter to Kitty. You think it’s easy to be romantic knowing that some officer with a leg full of shrapnel and a blank inkpad is going to be drooling over it?”

  “Ask your mom to send cookies,” Leland piped up from another hole.

  “And send them where?” Jacob demanded. “General Delivery—Europe?”

  “There is no General Delivery,” Beau rumbled. “We’ve got an Eisenhower, a Bradley, a Patton—”

  “Ben Schwartz’s mother sent a salami from Brooklyn and it found him just fine,” Leland argued. “First Platoon had heartburn for a week.”

  “Maybe it came with the ammo,” Jacob mused. “They probably thought it was a torpedo.”

  Lieutenant McCoy, newly recovered from his D-Day injuries, strode among the foxholes. “Pack up, men. We’re moving out.”

  Cries of protest rose from the ground all around him.

  “Moving out?” Leland echoed. “Battalion said to dig in and get a few hours’ sleep.”

  “I know,” the officer shot back. “I’m the one they told it to. Now they want us on the move again.”

  There was no shortage of grumbling, but the men of Bravo Company were out of their foxholes and ready to go in a matter of minutes. The past seven weeks had been a whirlwind of firefights, troop movements, and, occasionally, a rare chance to drop back for a meal and a rest. Sometimes they would be on the go for as long as three days and nights. The exhaustion was so constant that it had become their normal state. Jacob had learned to sleep in a foxhole, or even standing up during a break on a long march. He could take apart his rifle, clean it, and put it back together again while not completely awake.

  Without regular sleep, the days and nights blurred together. In some ways, the seven weeks of near-constant fighting felt like much less. Yet basic training at Fort Benning might as well have been in another life. Jacob could get used to all of it—except the combat. When bullets were flying and shells bursting, his heart would beat so hard and so fast that he feared it might explode out of his chest. Those moments—sometimes hours; sometimes whole days—were so loud, so chaotic, so violent that they almost belonged to another universe. Then someone close by would be hit—wounded or killed—and reality would intrude once more.

  When Jacob closed his eyes, the picture of what bullets or shrapnel could do to a human being was never far away. He had already seen more death than he’d ever imagined possible. And more blood—it was hard to believe there could be so much of it. At times, he had found himself surrounded by so many bodies—from both sides in this war—that it became difficult to remember that these had once been people. Brothers and sons. Husbands and fathers and friends …

  Friends. The word was a sucker punch to Jacob’s gut.

  Freddie.

  Like a scratched record jumping back to the same discordant note, that horrible moment on Omaha Beach played over and over in Jacob’s brain. The crack of the detonating mine. The unbelieving look on Freddie’s face just before he was launched skyward.

  And then …

  Don’t think about it! Jacob commanded himself. That shattered body was not his buddy. Not Freddie, with his open, comfortable face and warm, easy laugh.

  But every time Jacob let himself remember the Freddie from Fort Benning or Petersfield, the image soon shifted. Freddie, lifeless on Omaha Beach.

  Freddie who would never be Freddie again.

  Despite his exhaustion, Jacob was almost grateful for the order to move out.

  Some memories were too awful to dwell upon.

  Bravo Company was on the go again, trying to stay alert, watchful.

  “I miss the tanks,” Leland said wanly. “That’s the best place to be when the shooting starts—right behind something big and armored.”

  “Are you crazy?” Beau countered. “A Sherman is like a gigantic green target. Give me a good hiding place every time.”

  The conversation went back and forth about the pros and cons of tanks as they marched along a country lane. It wasn’t long before Jacob had the sense that some kind of battle had taken place not far from there—fallen leaves and branches, singed grasses, broken wires hanging from poles.

  Eventually, they reached the site of the fighting—a tiny village, perhaps six or seven buildings in all. It was empty of inhabitants. The people of Normandy had gotten good at leaving town before the war reached them. There wasn’t a single window that hadn’t been shattered by gunfire, and a couple of walls had collapsed due to mortar shells or grenades. The locals had made the right decision to desert their homes.

  Jacob reached down and picked up a German helmet. There was a bullet hole through the side, but otherwis
e the metal was shiny and perfect, as if it had just come from the factory. The inside was caked with dried blood. He dropped it quickly and moved on.

  In a field beyond the town, a crashed plane lay with its nose half buried in the tilled earth. As the company continued along the lane, Jacob scrambled to a gap in the hedge for a better look. It was a fighter, a British Mustang.

  “Hurry up, High School,” Beau called.

  Jacob was about to jump back down the berm when something inside the cockpit moved. “Lieutenant!” he shouted. “There’s somebody in that plane! Somebody alive!”

  He jumped down to the field and ran toward the plane. When he reached the cockpit, he found a pair of eyes peering out at him, and even a smiling face. He was greeted by a very British “Hello.”

  Because of the impact of the crash, the pilot was trapped in his seat, his legs pressed forward under the smashed instrument panel. The smell of leaking fuel was almost overpowering.

  “Are you all right?” Jacob asked.

  “Just a little spot of bother,” the Englishman acknowledged.

  By this time, Beau, Leland, and several others were hightailing it across the field to offer their help.

  The cockpit door had jammed, so they had to pry it open with their shovels. Jacob and Beau took hold of the Englishman from under his arms and pulled him free of the wreckage. When they set him down, he took one wobbly step and collapsed.

  “Blimey,” he observed. “My leg’s been shot through with anti-aircraft fire.”

  Beau was amazed. “And you’re just noticing that now?”

  “My foot was asleep,” he explained. “It was trapped under the rudder bar when I crashed.” He looked back at his plane. “Well, that’s seen better days.”

  “How long have you been here?” Jacob asked.

  “That would depend. What’s the date today?”

  “July twenty-fifth,” Leland supplied.