by Alan Gratz
“Forget that pompous fool,” Dorothy whispered. “How would you like to hitch a ride to Bayeux and see a real military hospital in action?”
“Bayeux’s not far from here, is it?” Dorothy said. She hitched a foot up on the bumper of a truck and grabbed the side. “We can be there and back before it gets late.”
“What? No. But—” Monique stammered. She had found the courage to leave the beach hut, to join Dorothy in helping wounded soldiers, to stand up to the beach master. But to leave her village and go to Bayeux?
Dorothy hopped up into the back of the truck. It was meant to have a canvas roof over the back end, but since it wasn’t raining, the truck drivers had taken it off so the wounded could be loaded and unloaded more quickly.
Dorothy found a place to kneel among the stretchers and put a hand out to Monique. “Come on!” she said. “More medics have arrived here on the beach anyway. They’ve got things under control. Let’s see what we can do to help elsewhere.”
“I Will Wait” popped into Monique’s head again, and she felt the pull of her own fear. She bit a fingernail. This was too much, surely. It was so much easier to say no, to find her bike in the grass and go home.
And hide, she scolded herself. If she was going to do that, she might as well go crawl back in the beach hut. No—she had stepped out into the Allied invasion, and she wasn’t going back.
Monique took Dorothy’s hand and pulled herself up. The truck began to move, and Monique settled in beside one of the wounded soldiers.
“Oh!” Monique said, suddenly remembering. The hut. “I left my bathing suit in the changing hut again!”
“What do you mean?” Dorothy asked.
Monique told Dorothy the story of why she’d gone to the beach that morning in the first place, and the reporter laughed.
“Well, you can rest assured your bathing suit is now being protected by thousands of strapping young American men, my dear,” Dorothy told her.
Monique blushed and looked away, over the fields that stretched out from the dunes beyond the town.
“Wait! Stop the truck! Stop the truck!” Monique cried.
Dorothy grabbed her arm in alarm. “What is it?” she asked.
“A wounded soldier, there in the field.” Monique stood and pointed. “I can see him breathing. It looks bad, but no one’s gone to help him.”
“Stop the truck!” Dorothy called out in English to the driver.
“What? Why?” the soldier called back. “Wait, are you a dame?”
“Oh, dash it all, there will be other trucks,” Dorothy told Monique. “Come on.”
“What are you—?” Monique began, but Dorothy was already climbing out of the truck. While it was moving! Monique hurried to follow her. No time to debate it now; Monique didn’t want to get separated from Dorothy. Together they climbed down to the bottom step at the back of the truck, and on the count of three, they jumped onto the dirt road. They both fell and tumbled, but Monique was up in a flash and running toward the field.
“Wait!” Dorothy called after her, but Monique kept going. She was done waiting. She ran until she felt Dorothy grab her by the arm and pull her back. “Wait, Monique! That sign—I can read a little German. The important bits, at least. And that sign says ‘Warning: Mines’ in German. That must be why no one’s gone after him.” She nodded to the still figure of the soldier up ahead.
“No, no,” Monique said. “There are no mines.” She tried to pull her arm away from Dorothy.
“Monique, stop! I want to help that boy as much as you do, but that sign says he’s stuck in the middle of a minefield! There’s nothing we can do until the minesweepers make it up off the beach.”
“No,” Monique told her. “You don’t understand. It’s not a real minefield at all. The Germans, they meant to bury mines here, but they never got around to it. I know—I come by here every day! They just put that sign up to trick people. The Germans were playing soccer in that field just yesterday!”
Monique finally pulled herself free and ran for the soldier. Dorothy still called after her, but Monique didn’t wait. There were no mines in the field, and she knew it.
When Dorothy saw Monique was right, she followed her into the field.
Monique knelt by the American soldier. He was very young, and short and skinny. He looked like he wasn’t even out of school yet. He was cute too, Monique thought, despite the bandage on his arm, the cut on his face, and the bullet wound to his shoulder. He had blond hair, long lashes, and a quiet, restful face.
Dorothy came up behind her. “Another boy,” she said. “And this one even younger than the rest.”
“He’s got minor injuries that have already been treated by someone,” Monique said, looking him over, “but he’s taken a bullet to the shoulder and has lost a lot of blood.” She looked around, surprised he was the only wounded soldier in the whole field. “Where were your friends?” Monique whispered to him. “Why didn’t you have anyone with you who could help?”
The boy didn’t answer, of course. Even if he understood French, he was long since unconscious.
“Do you still have the bandages?” Monique asked.
Dorothy already had the bandages and tape and scissors ready, and Monique hummed a Lucienne Boyer song, “Speak to Me of Love,” as she worked.
“You’ve changed your tune,” Dorothy said.
Monique smiled. So she had.
Dorothy pulled out the soldier’s dog tags and read the boy’s name.
“D. Carpenter. Well, D., this is your lucky day,” Dorothy told the unconscious boy. “Dr. Monique is on the case.”
Dee bumped and swayed as he slowly regained consciousness. He heard the growl of an engine and the grinding of gears. He was in a truck. On his back. His body ached, and his head swam, but it was his shoulder that drew his waking attention. It was strangely numb and sore at the same time. He remembered leaving Sid behind with the prisoners in the village. Gunshots. A field. All by himself, ready to give his life to stop Hitler—
Dee’s eyes fluttered open, and he saw stars. Some of them were in his eyes, like he’d just rubbed them, but more of them were tiny twinkling lights in the sky. He was in the back of an army truck with its canvas roof taken off.
D-Day had become D-Night. Had he really just come ashore in France that morning? It seemed like a lifetime ago.
“It looks like your patient is awake, Doctor,” a woman said.
Her face appeared above Dee, a round, kind face that blocked out the stars. Another face joined hers, that of a young girl, and Dee blinked stupidly, his brain still foggy. The girl said something in French, and the woman translated for her.
“Dr. Monique says you may be a bit groggy,” she told Dee. “You lost a lot of blood, and you had to be given morphine for the pain.”
“Doctor?” Dee said. He didn’t understand. “A girl? How old—?”
“Thirteen,” the woman said. “And what, you don’t think a thirteen-year-old French girl can be a doctor? Look at you. You can’t be much older, and you’re a soldier.”
“I’m—I’m sixteen,” Dee said, his muddy head making him honest about his age.
“Boys and girls, playing at war,” the woman said quietly.
“Are you—nurses?” Dee asked, still trying to understand.
“I’m a reporter,” the woman said. “Dorothy Powell, Collier’s magazine. And Monique here isn’t a nurse, she’s a doctor. In training.”
Dee was having trouble keeping up. “Where—?” he tried to ask.
“We’re on our way to a hospital in Bayeux,” Dorothy said.
Dee tried to sit up.
“Non, non, non, non,” Dr. Monique said, pushing him back down.
“Now, now,” Dorothy said. “You’re not going anywhere with that shoulder until we get you some proper treatment.”
“And then—back to my platoon,” Dee said. “If any of the guys from my platoon are still alive.”
“We’ll see,” Dorothy said.
/> Monique asked Dorothy a question in French, and Dorothy answered her. Dee didn’t understand their conversation, but Monique’s expression and tone told him she didn’t think he had much chance of returning to the fight. But he would. He would show them. He lay back and closed his eyes. He had to keep fighting. Had to make up for what his former countrymen were doing to the world.
Dee zoned in and out as they bounced along, and as his brain got less muddled, the pain in his shoulder grew. Perhaps the wound was worse than he thought. But it was only a shoulder. He could still run, still pull a trigger.
The road got smoother, and buildings began to appear. They were in Bayeux at last.
Bayeux. Dee suddenly remembered: That was the town the Englishman from the tank had talked about.
Bill. The Bayeux Tapestry. Dee felt a lump in his throat. Bill is never going to get to Bayeux now, never going to see his tapestry, Dee thought sadly. Dee would ask around about the tapestry, go see it if he could, before he moved on to the front. For Bill and the Achilles crew.
Dee propped himself up on his good side to try to see the city. Now that Bayeux was under Allied control and not worried about British bombers, all the streetlights were on.
The city was, amazingly, still in one piece. Dee knew that other cities in Normandy had been bombed for months by the Allies, but Bayeux had clearly been spared. It looked as though there hadn’t been any fighting here today. Its cobblestone streets and white-brick houses, its cathedrals and canals, its flower-lined avenues and little cafés, they were all preserved, like a dream. Like war had never come to France. Like they had never been occupied by the Nazis.
But war had come to Bayeux, and Dee and all the other American and English soldiers were the proof. Soldiers filled the streets of the city, marching, strolling, reconnecting with their regiments. There were so many soldiers coming and going that the tanks and supply trucks pushing for the front could barely navigate the streets.
Dee caught himself looking for Sid’s familiar face in the crowd, then stopped. Sid wouldn’t want Dee to find him anyway.
There were French people in the streets too. The ones who had stayed in Normandy. Old men and women grabbed soldiers as they passed, hugging them and kissing their cheeks. Children offered soldiers wine and bread, and sang songs from upstairs windows. It felt like a party in Bayeux, not like Day One of the battle to free France.
“Where are the Nazis?” Dee asked.
“Ran away,” Dorothy said. “From Bayeux, at least. That’s what I was told. No doubt regrouping for a counterattack. But word among the soldiers is that to the east, the Brits are holding two bridges, and the Canadians have taken German garrisons. American paratroopers hold the roads in from the west. All of which happened before you ever set foot on the beach. The Resistance has been active in the south as well. They’re all keeping the German reinforcements at bay.”
Dee nodded. “It won’t hold them off forever though,” he said.
“No,” Dorothy admitted. “But it’s given us a toehold, at least. A place to start.”
That’s just what Sergeant Taylor had told them, Dee remembered. All the way back on the landing boat before the ramp had dropped. Before the sergeant had died in Dee’s arms. Today was meant to be the first step in pushing the Germans all the way back to Berlin—and incredibly, it had worked.
Bits and pieces of conversations in English filtered up to Dee as the truck inched through the crowds.
“Okay, so the Jerries come out of the château and surrender to us, and there’s twice as many of them as there are of us,” Dee heard a soldier with a Canadian accent say to another soldier. From the truck, Dee couldn’t see the soldiers’ uniforms, but he could see that they wore helmets with little shreds of fabric tucked into the netting, the way paratroopers did.
“They were mad as hornets,” the Canadian paratrooper went on, “but it’s not like they could unsurrender!”
The two soldiers laughed, and Dee grinned. It was just the kind of thing Sid would have said, if that had happened to them.
If Sid was still alive.
And if Sid was still talking to him.
The street grew too crowded for the truck to move, and the driver laid on the horn and cursed. Beside the truck, Dee saw that a French café was open, and the owner was pouring free drinks for the liberating soldiers. Allied soldiers crowded around him, raising glasses and toasting each other.
“Hey—no darkies served here,” Dee heard someone say.
One of the white American soldiers was standing in the way of a black American medic. Dee realized with a start that he knew him—it was Henry, the man who’d saved Sid’s life on the beach, the man who had shown such amazing courage.
“Hey, let him have a drink,” Dee yelled from the truck. “He saved my buddy’s life!”
But another white American soldier came up, and so did another, forming a wall between the black medic and the owner of the café.
“Go find a colored restaurant,” a white soldier told Henry.
Dee tried to get up, to climb out of the truck and stand with the medic, but Dr. Monique said, “Non non non,” and pushed him back down again.
Dee saw Henry leave the café without a drink. The medic met Dee’s gaze. As the truck lurched and moved on, Henry gave Dee an informal salute before turning and disappearing into the crowd.
Dorothy looked from Henry back to Dee. “We’ve come so far together,” Dorothy said, “but we still have so far to go.”
The truck didn’t have any farther to go though. It pulled to a stop in the town square, and Dee watched as soldiers began unloading the stretchers. He heard someone say that the hospital was already crowded with patients, and they were instead being moved into a triage center in the plaza across from Bayeux’s cathedral. Cots and blankets with wounded soldiers crowded the plaza, and nurses and medics moved among the patients, deciding who would move on to the hospital and who could be treated and released.
Two soldiers grabbed Dee’s stretcher, but Dee made them wait before they carried him off.
“Thank you,” Dee told Dorothy and Monique. “Whoever you are—you saved my life.”
Monique blushed. “Au revoir,” she told Dee.
Dorothy nodded at him. “You’re welcome,” she replied. “Now don’t waste it.” She gave Dee a mock salute. “See you, kid.” She and Monique stood up together. “Now we’re off to stick our noses in where they’re not welcome some more.”
The soldiers carried Dee away and deposited him among the other wounded soldiers in the plaza. A medic appeared beside him—a white medic he hadn’t seen before—and without warning, he stuck Dee with a needle in his arm.
“Ow! Hey!” Dee said.
The medic connected the needle to an IV, and soon Dee was getting a transfusion of new blood.
“Can I get back to fighting soon?” Dee asked.
“Somebody’ll be along to let you know,” the medic said, and before Dee could ask anything else, the medic was already off to see to other wounded soldiers.
Dee lay back and stared up at the night sky above the plaza. It was hard to imagine that back home in Philadelphia it was just around six o’clock. His parents would be coming home from work right now, his classmates hanging out at the drugstore soda counter. All of them safe and sound, while Dee was lying here, shot through the shoulder, in a makeshift hospital in a city in France.
“Thank you,” Dee heard a girl say to him in a heavy French accent.
Dee sat up, thinking Dr. Monique had come to see him again. Instead, there was a young brown-skinned girl in front of him, wearing a blue kerchief over her black hair. Beside her, holding the girl’s hand like she would never let her go, was a beautiful woman in a tan trench coat, with light brown skin, black hair, a heart-shaped face, and a long, angular nose. The girl’s face was rounder, her eyes wider and younger, but the resemblance was unmistakable. They had to be mother and daughter.
“Thank you,” the girl said again, and handed Dee
a white lily from a bunch of them she held in her hand. Dee accepted the flower, feeling confused.
“My daughter thanks you for saving my life,” the woman explained, her English also accented, but easier to understand.
“Were you in the church?” Dee said. He didn’t remember helping them through the window, and he couldn’t imagine ever forgetting either one of them.
“No,” the woman said. “I was being held prisoner here in Bayeux.”
Dee looked apologetic and tried to hand the lily back. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I think you must have me confused with someone else. I wasn’t the one who freed you.”
“Not you alone, no,” the woman said. “You all did, just by coming here.” She looked around, gesturing at the soldiers. “You freed me, and thousands of other people in Normandy. And soon you will free all of France. All of Europe.”
“I— Well, thank you,” Dee said, accepting the lily from the girl. “What’s your name?” he asked, then tried again in phrasebook French. “Comment vous appelez-vous?”
The girl smiled at his obvious butchering of her language, but she understood.
“Samira,” she said. “Je m’appelle Samira.”
“Thank you, Samira,” Dee said.
The girl nodded to him, and Dee watched as she and her mother moved on to deliver a lily to the next soldier in the row. Who were they? Did they live here in Bayeux? What part had they played in this day?
“Not even here a day,” someone said beside Dee, “and you’re already a hit with the ladies.”
Dee turned.
Sid Jacobstein stood over his bed.
“Sid!” Dee said. The joy at seeing his friend again—still alive!—was quickly replaced by apprehensiveness. The last time he had seen Sid, his friend had pointed a rifle at him and told him to get lost. Now his rifle was over his shoulder, and he turned the stem of the white lily in his hand.
Sid looked uncomfortable, like he didn’t know whether to stay or go, or what to say. Dee didn’t know what to say either.
“I … see you met Samira and her mother,” Dee said.