War Stories

by Gordon Korman

  The city was still a very strange place. Parisians insisted on celebrating the surrender of the German garrison even as rogue Nazi units continued to fight. It was as if someone was throwing a gigantic party in an active war zone.

  On the fourth day, with no warning, Bravo Company was roused before dawn, loaded into trucks, and driven out of the city in a northeasterly direction.

  “Where to, Lieutenant?” Beau asked McCoy.

  The platoon leader made a face at him. “Where did you guys get the idea that they tell me any more than they tell you? You think Eisenhower talks it over with Bradley, and I’m next?”

  “You should write your congressman,” Jacob deadpanned.

  “Smart aleck,” McCoy snorted. “The Germans are falling back all over France. We’re expecting counterattacks, but we don’t know where. Battalion says be ready for anything.”

  “Lucky us,” Beau groaned.

  Progress was steady. For the first day, they could hear bombs and artillery all around them, but they themselves encountered no fighting. The next morning, their camp was strafed by two German Messerschmitts. Jacob, Beau, and Leland spent a tense twenty minutes lying in the muddy earth under a jeep, praying that a direct hit wouldn’t explode its gas tank. Miraculously, there were no casualties, although Sergeant Rajinsky knocked himself unconscious on a tree branch while running for cover.

  As a medic was bandaging Rajinsky’s head after the strafing, Captain Marone roared up in a jeep, his face all urgency. “New orders!” he barked at McCoy. “We’re moving out!”

  “Break camp!” McCoy bawled to the members of Third Platoon. To the company commander, he added, “Where to, Captain?”

  “Retreating Germans are blowing every bridge in France,” Marone explained. “But spotter planes found one they haven’t gotten to yet—over the Aisne River.” It came out Aiz-nee.

  “I think it’s pronounced En,” Jacob volunteered helpfully.

  The captain glared at him. “I don’t care if it’s pronounced Harold. Our orders are to take it and hold it before the enemy blows it up.” He drove off.

  Throwing their gear into the truck, Leland asked Jacob, “How come you know that? You don’t speak French.”

  Jacob shrugged. “Geography class. I’m in high school, remember?”

  Beau laughed. “Yeah, well, if you don’t want to dig a lot of latrines, try not to dazzle the captain with your brilliance. Especially not in front of the whole platoon.”

  They were loaded up and on the move in a matter of minutes. Even if they hadn’t heard their mission from Captain Marone, Jacob would have been able to tell that they were in a big hurry. The trucks were driving far too fast for the French rural roads, which had been made even rougher by shell craters and battle debris. The trip was a teeth-rattling experience.

  “Never thought I’d get a rougher ride than on the Higgins boat on D-Day,” Leland complained, his face positively green. “But I guess that guy Higgins invented a truck too.”

  “It’s like the bumper cars at the county fair,” Beau put in morosely. “The only thing missing is cotton candy.”

  But no carnival ride lasted two hours without a break and included the prospect of enemy soldiers shooting at you at the end. They passed several French villages, some of them completely destroyed, others totally intact. It made Jacob reflect on the randomness of this war, where the difference between life and death was a roll of fate’s dice.

  As the journey went on, a familiar tension rose in the men of Bravo Company, edging out every other emotion, even the discomfort of motion sickness. They were all battle-hardened now, with a sixth sense for when trouble was coming.

  Yet when the trucks came within sight of the Aisne and slowed to a cautious approach, there were no enemies in sight. Jacob stood up for a better view. A truss bridge about forty meters long spanned the river, its superstructure formed by a triangular lattice of steel beams. The spotter planes were right: It was intact. Up until this moment, it had been in Nazi hands. But as far as Bravo Company could see, there was no sign of an occupying force—no German soldiers, no tanks or staff cars, no Nazi flags.

  The idling truck engines swelled to a crescendo and the convoy moved forward toward the bridge. That was when Jacob’s sharp eyes spied what the spotter planes had missed—tightly packed bundles strapped to the underside of the roadbed all across the span. There were at least five.

  “Stop the trucks!” he bellowed, waving wildly at McCoy.

  The lieutenant radioed Marone and Bravo Company came to a halt once again so Jacob’s discovery could be investigated. Sure enough, the bundles turned out to be charges of dynamite strategically placed beneath the bridge.

  “So the Germans were planning to blow this one too,” Marone mused.

  “Why didn’t they?” McCoy wondered. “It’s all ready to go.”

  There were two possibilities: 1) In the chaos of withdrawal, the bridge had been forgotten. Somewhere in the woods on the other side was a plunger with no German to plunge it. Or 2) The enemy had left a rear guard with orders to set off the dynamite when an Allied convoy was crossing.

  Marone got in touch with battalion and explained the dilemma. Bravo Company sweated, waiting for an answer—ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. It wasn’t hours, but in a time pressure situation, in a place where they could find themselves under sudden enemy fire at any second, it felt like forever. When the answer finally came, they understood the delay. Their situation had been passed all the way up the chain of command to SHAEF—Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. The order was from General Bradley himself: Remove the charges and take control of the bridge.

  The army had engineers and sappers who were experts in dealing with explosives. The problem was that the nearest of them was at least half a day away. The men of Bravo Company were going to have to take care of it themselves.

  “All right,” McCoy addressed his platoon. “Who’s got some experience with dynamite?”

  The silence was deafening.

  Jacob raised a hand. “Back home, I helped the fire department set up the skyrockets for the Fourth of July.”

  “Shut up, High School!” Beau slammed an elbow into his ribs. To McCoy he said, “Don’t listen to him, Lieutenant! He’s stupid!”

  McCoy ignored him and focused on Jacob. “What about it, Firestone? Think you can handle this?”

  “I’ll give it a try,” Jacob agreed. “Somebody’s got to do it. It might as well be me.”

  “Idiot!” Beau raged. “This isn’t something you just ‘give a try’! If it doesn’t work out, they’ll hear the explosion back in Paris! They’ll be scraping bits of you off the Eiffel Tower—and bits of me too, because now I have to volunteer with you!”

  Twenty minutes later, Jacob was swaying at the end of a makeshift rope harness, examining the suspicious package strapped to the underside of the bridge.

  “What do you see, Firestone?” Marone called down to him.

  “Looks like about a dozen bundles of dynamite, six sticks each,” Jacob reported. “There are three different wires, red, black, and green …”

  As Jacob went on, Captain Marone repeated the description into a shortwave radio. On the other end was a demolition expert attached to a unit of engineers. Speaking through the captain, the sapper asked Jacob several questions that Jacob answered to the best of his ability. The expert’s final instructions were: Cut the red wire first, followed by the green wire. And if you were still alive, the black.

  “Still alive?” Beau was horrified. “What’s that supposed to mean? Doesn’t he know for sure?”

  There was still no sign of enemy presence on the other side. His hand shaking, Jacob took a pair of wire cutters and positioned the pincers around the red wire. It was hard to see what he was doing, because beads of perspiration were trickling down from his brow and stinging his eyes.

  The men looking down at him from the bridge were just as tense. “Don’t let the blades touch the metal contacts,” Marone advi
sed. “That could set off the whole charge.”

  “What?” came Beau’s outraged voice. “Why didn’t you tell him that first?”

  “Get that man off my bridge,” Marone ordered.

  As Beau was marched ashore, Jacob remembered his friend’s words: Don’t listen to him, Lieutenant. He’s stupid.

  He was right, Jacob reflected. I am stupid. And he cut the red wire.

  He waited to be consumed in a fireball. And when it didn’t happen, he was so overjoyed that he snipped the green and then the black in rapid succession.

  There was cheering from above. Emboldened, Jacob undid the strapping and watched as the deadly charge dropped into the river and disappeared harmlessly below the surface. He was hauled back up to the bridge, where he and three others were ordered to take out the remaining four charges.

  Soon Jacob was hanging from his harness near the opposite terminus of the bridge. Now that he was an experienced bomb defuser, it was easy enough for him to snip the wires in order—red, green, black. He flashed a thumbs-up to the others to show he was done.

  As he moved to unstrap his deactivated charge, his peripheral vision caught sight of just a hint of movement in the woods—the unmistakable squarish shape of a German army helmet.

  “Look out!” he bellowed. But even as the warning was torn from him, he understood how completely useless it was. Trapped in their harnesses, the four GIs were dangling like worms on hooks. There was no escape.

  With a deafening roar, the center charge detonated, turning the air red with flame. Suddenly, Leland was gone, and the bridge, in slow motion, was cracking open.

  “Leland!” Jacob cried, oblivious to the hot shower of concrete and twisted metal blasting over him.

  But there was no point in looking for his friend. So close to the explosion, there was zero chance Leland could have survived. Trembling with shock and weeping with grief, Jacob barely noticed he was falling—and that pieces of the roadway were raining down on him. He wriggled out of his harness and dropped to the river. A split second later a large chunk of the bridge, with the ropes still attached, splashed into the water mere inches away.

  The plunge drove him under, and when he surfaced again, coughing and spitting, the war had returned to this corner of France. A small platoon of Germans had appeared at the edge of the woods, firing on Bravo Company across the Aisne and at the hapless swimmers in the water. Jacob swam for the opposite shore, but the current drove him backward. He fought it, stroking with all his might, but every time he checked, his people seemed a little more distant. He was only ten meters from the far bank now, in the shadow of what used to be the bridge. It was nothing but a twisted ramp that led to thin air.

  In a snap decision, he turned around and made for the closer bank. He came ashore perhaps fifteen meters downstream from the Germans, who were setting up a mortar to fire on the trucks across the river.

  He splashed up on the bank, shocked and exhausted, but driven by a primitive impulse for survival. A quick glance confirmed that the Germans hadn’t seen him yet. All their attention was concentrated on the river and the Allied forces on the other side. Jacob had no weapon except for his combat knife. He had taken off his rifle, ammunition belt, grenades, and pack when he’d climbed down from the bridge. All alone on the wrong side of the Aisne, he couldn’t fight. His only option was escape.

  Keeping low, he ran for the cover of the trees. He was almost there when a gunshot rang out and a bullet took a bite out of a white birch right by his head. He’d been spotted.

  The thought gave his feet wings. He sprinted through the woods, dodging trees and underbrush. Wild thoughts flashed through his mind: What should he do? Hide? Climb a tree? He couldn’t imagine either of those possibilities resulting in anything other than capture. Continuing to run seemed like the only option. But wasn’t that taking him ever farther into enemy territory?

  He burst into a clearing and looked around desperately. Pup tents circled a firepit. In dismay, he realized that he’d delivered himself to the German camp. There was only one soldier present, and he was burdened with an armload of firewood. The man gawked at the American suddenly in his presence. The wood dropped to the ground and the German lunged for a pistol that sat in front of one of the tents. Jacob got there before him and kicked the weapon into some tall grass.

  What now? Jacob thought. Would he have to wrestle this enemy hand to hand? No—he could hear signs of pursuit behind him. He had to get away.

  That was when he saw it—a motorcycle parked at the edge of the clearing. He made for it, moving like lightning. He jumped aboard, landing on the kick start, and the machine roared to life.

  Jacob had only ridden a motorcycle once before—and it had terrified him. He had made one circle around a cul-de-sac and that had been more than enough. Now he was comparing terrors. This was definitely the lesser one.

  He wasn’t even sure German motorcycles operated the same way as their American counterparts. There was only one way to find out.

  He twisted the throttle. The machine roared and leaped forward with such a burst of speed that it bucked him like a bronco. He picked himself off the ground and caught up with it about fifteen feet away, lying on its side, wheels still spinning. Using what little strength he had left, he hauled it upright, hopped back on, and took off, accelerating more slowly this time.

  Hands shaking, he weaved between trees, aching for speed, but not daring to use it. Eventually, the bike’s front wheel found a groove of hard-packed mud, and eventually thumped onto pavement, where it nearly rear-ended a German troop truck parked by the side of the road. He dismounted again, just long enough to plunge his knife into all four tires. He couldn’t stop the enemy from coming after him, but that didn’t mean he had to make it easy for them.

  Instinct told him he had to get back to Bravo Company. But there was the little matter of a giant bridge that was no longer there. He was trapped—trapped on the wrong side of the Aisne.

  It was a problem with no solution, a jigsaw puzzle with no pieces to fill in the holes. The closest thing to a plan Jacob could think of was to go the other way. Maybe he could somehow find another road that led to another bridge—one that hadn’t been blown up yet, or one that had been repaired. The chances were slim to none, but he had to try.

  He wheeled around and took off, speeding deeper toward who knew what. He felt his US Army uniform flashing on and off like a neon sign in the shape of a bull’s-eye. If he ran into a German convoy, he was done for. But for now, he was still alive and still free. He twisted the throttle a little harder and the bike accelerated.

  He risked a glance over his shoulder to see if he was being chased and almost lost control of the motorcycle. Riding the thing required 100 percent concentration. He could do it, but the slightest wriggle, the barest yawn, the merest blink would put him in the ditch. This powerful machine was his salvation for the moment, but it could be just as deadly as the enemy if he let it get away from him at this speed.

  Eventually, he started to get the hang of the bike, leaning into the turns and squinting to protect his eyes from the onslaught of wind. Another advantage of being exposed to the elements: In no time, his soaked uniform was completely dry, and he’d stopped shivering with cold. He kept his eyes peeled for road signs—he remembered from Paris that pont meant bridge.

  He shook his head to clear it. He was in big trouble that was getting bigger by the minute. But when he tried to think, the only subject that would come to his mind was poor Leland. There had been a dozen other guys on that bridge, but at least they had a chance.

  First Freddie, now Leland. Oh, sure, their battalion alone had lost over a hundred men since D-Day, but of the four friends from Fort Benning, two were already gone. And here was Jacob, trapped behind enemy lines, in grave danger of becoming number three. At least Beau’s big mouth had gotten him kicked off the bridge, so that meant he was relatively safe.

  A loud horn jarred Jacob out of his reverie. Lost in his mourning, he’d be
en sailing down the middle of the road, directly in the path of an oncoming car. Jacob swerved to the side, peering in through the windshield to see if the driver wore a German uniform.

  This turned out to be a mistake. His front tire hit a pothole and the handlebars were wrenched from his nerveless fingers. By the time he regained his grip, it was too late. The motorcycle was airborne and so was Jacob.

  They parted company somewhere near the apex of the jump. He came down in the ditch with a force that turned the whole world black. He never heard the motorcycle hit the ground a few feet away from him.

  How long did he lie there unconscious? He had no way of knowing. Was it dark now? Or was his vision clouded by his injury? He knew he was injured. That much pain had to mean something.

  No, it was a shadow—a face leaning over him.

  “American?” a deep voice asked.

  Jacob looked up, blinking, struggling to focus. The man wore no uniform, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t the enemy. Captain Marone had told them of SS officers who wore civilian clothes.

  In answer, Jacob fumbled his dog tags from under his collar and began reading his serial number. That and his name and rank were all he was required to give.

  The man held out a hand. “You are a long way from Broadway, monsieur.”

  Jacob’s eyes fixed on the stranger’s reaching hand. He wore a ring engraved with a symbol Jacob had never seen before—a double-barred cross.

  It was the last thing he would see for three days.

  “It looked bigger the last time I was here.” G.G.’s voice had a tone of complaint to it. “And the drop down to the water was definitely farther.”

  The Citroën was parked at the side of the road, and the three Firestones gazed out at the span over the Aisne River.