by Bill Mesce
“You let me know if you start feelin’ sick-like, Major,” the pilot called back. “I’ll bank ’er over so you can heave out the window. You wouldn’t want us all sittin’ in it.”
Ryan gave Harry a grievous, admonishing look. “That’s right, Major. You wouldn’t want that, now, would you?”
Harry was still trying to think of some bitingly witty retort when the plane started to lift. “Ohhh...” Harry said, and closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the neat little fields pinwheeling below.
Joe Ryan laughed.
Ryan would later tell Harry they’d only been airborne less than thirty minutes, but Harry would swear a sacred oath that he’d counted at least several lifetimes pass before he felt the Piper Cub on the ground again, bouncing along another pasture as lumpy with cow manure as the one they’d left outside London. The aeroplane drew to a stop near a pair of jeeps with Royal Army insignia, and the pilot killed the engine. The propeller was still windmilling when Harry Voss reached out the door and grabbed hold of a strut the way a drowning man clutches a life preserver. He pulled himself out of the cabin and set his feet gingerly onto the grass as if terrified it would again spin away beneath him.
“Aw, hell,” he said, and Ryan chuckled when he saw poor Harry scraping manure off his shoe with a stick.
“C’mon, Harry,” Ryan called. “Stop dawdling.”
Harry glared at the squadron of cows clustered in the shade of a tree, then followed Ryan toward the jeeps, trying to scrape his sole clean on the pasture grass as he walked.
There were a pair of Tommies lounging in the front seats of one of the jeeps. One eased himself out and gave Ryan a polite if perfunctory salute. “Colonel Ryan, is it?” he asked. He handed Ryan a map. “Just follow where it’s marked, sir. And I’ve got a chit somewheres for you to sign for the jeep.”
Harry climbed into the passenger seat of the other jeep. A copy of a Spy Smasher cartoon book lay on the floor. Harry held the magazine up. “This belong to anybody?” The two Tommies looked at each other and both pretended ignorance.
“You navigate,” Ryan said and tossed the map to Harry as he slid behind the wheel. There was a manic grin on his face. “Hey, Harry-boy, you think that buzz boy in the plane was something?”
“Joe, just take it — ”
The gears made painful sounds and Harry was flung back into his seat. He grabbed the map with one hand, his hat with the other, and rued not having a third with which to hold himself in his seat. It seemed like Ryan had the jeep half off the road more often than not, with one set of wheels bobbing over stones, exposed roots, and small bushes, while the other set slid and spun on the gravel track.
“For God’s sake, Joe — ”
“Is this our turn, Harry?”
Harry let go of the map and grabbed the windscreen to keep from being hurled out of the vehicle. The hinged windscreen flipped up in his hands.
“Hey!” Ryan barked. “What the hell’re you doing? Trying to kill us?”
“You crazy — ”
They lurched through a hole and Harry let the windscreen crash down on the hood as he grabbed the sides of his seat.
Harry saw little of the surrounding country: a blur of small farms; low, earth-colored barns; scattered livestock. The trees by the roadside became fewer, the fields less cultivated, the lush heather coating the low hills gave way to low, scraggly grass. Harry smelled salt air. He wiped a squashed fly off his face and prayed their itinerary wouldn’t include a bobbing boat ride.
Ryan turned onto a short straightaway and violently downshifted to a halt in front of a 4x4 pulled across the road, four Tommies posted round it. It was time for Harry to enjoy Ryan’s discomfort; the Brits wouldn’t let them pass.
“No admittance, sir,” a young lance corporal with a face full of freckles told Ryan. “Sorry. Orders.”
Ryan took a calming breath. What was amusing to see happen to others lit a short fuse in himself. “Corporal, you better let me explain. I’m from the U.S. Army’s Judge Advocate General’s office. In London. From Headquarters. And — ”
“Sorry, Colonel, but like I says; whole area’s off limits. Orders.”
Harry thought he saw the lance corporal suppressing a little grin at the corner of his lips. Belated revenge for the Revolution, no doubt.
“You’re not going to let me pass?” Ryan asked.
“Can’t, sir. Sorry, sir. You’ll just have to turn ’er round — ”
“Stop smirking, Harry. Corporal, whose orders are these?”
“Cap’n Ottinger, sir — ’e’s me officer — ’n’ some Ya — uh, an American cap’n — ”
“Captain, hm? Well, Corporal, I’m a Yank, too; a Yank colonel — ”
“Colonel, I’m sorry, but I’ve got — ”
“Fine!” Ryan threw the jeep into reverse. “It’s a long trip from London to here, Corporal,” he called out as he wrestled the jeep through an about-turn, “and it’s a long trip back! I’m going to be thinking about you that whole, looong time!”
“Well, I’m a Yank colonel,” Harry mimicked as Ryan took the jeep down the road. It wasn’t often he got to give it back to Ryan, and he was relishing it. “But I got me orders, sir,” he responded to himself, his Cockney as wretched as Ryan’s brogue.
Ryan glanced over his shoulder to the roadblock. “Little bastards are all having a good laugh. Ha ha. You think it’s funny, too, Harry?”
“Well — ”
The roadblock still in view, Ryan whipped the jeep off the road. He sent it bounding across the empty field, back past the soldiers in the road.
Harry hugged his seat. “Are you nuts?”
“What are they doing?” Ryan had to shout over the noise of engine and wind. The gleam in his eyes and dopey grin on his lips made Harry think of opium fiends.
“They’re waving at us. They’re shouting something. One of them is running after us.”
“I hope it’s that little snot corporal. Let the little bastard run. Let ’im get heatstroke. Is he laughing, Harry? I’ll bet he’s not laughing now.”
“Neither am I. He’s raising his gun!”
“He’d never fire.”
Something pinged into a rear fender.
“You were saying?”
“He’s just trying to scare us,” Ryan said.
Then, Ryan stamped on the brakes so hard he locked the wheels and almost vaulted them both over the hood. Ryan stood up in his seat, shading his eyes to look at something across the field. Another jeep was coming toward them from over the hills ahead.
Harry reached into his back pocket and pulled out his olive drab government-issue handkerchief and waved it limply in the air.
“Never surrender, Harry,” Ryan said, sliding back into his seat. “Even to allies.”
The jeep pulled up beside Ryan. Its driver was a pink-faced Royal Army captain not much older than the corporal at the roadblock. He was that very proper Royal Army type that the United Kingdom had been breeding since William the Conqueror: a backbone like a steel rod, slicked hair parted with a razor slash, and probably a birthmark that spelled “Sandhurst” somewhere under his knife-edge-creased uniform. “Morning, gentlemen,” the captain said blithely. “Bit of trouble at the roadblock, wot? Indulging in some improper procedure here, are we? Eh?”
“Your boys are lousy shots,” Ryan told him.
“Oh?” the captain said, nonplussed. “Didn’t they miss? I take it you’re Colonel Ryan.”
“And Major Voss.”
“Captain Ottinger.” The captain introduced himself with a tilt of his head and a touch of his quirt to the bill of his cap. “Been waiting for you chaps. Sorry about the security Orders from your people on high, wot? Why don’t you follow me in?”
In convoy, the two jeeps bounced along over the knolls behind the coastal cliffs. Beyond them, to the horizon, sat the blue-gray slash of the Channel. A few minutes later they came to a stop.
They saw the garden, then the cottage. Every square meter — from where they had
drawn up to the peak of the thatched roof — was pocked and bullet-torn. In the garden, something small and bloody lay under a tarpaulin.
Harry moaned.
“They didn’t tell me about this,” Ryan said to no one in particular. “I mean...not this.”
“Captain Bennett!” Ottinger called, climbing out of his jeep. “He’s from your H.Q.,” he explained to Ryan and Harry.
An Army Air Corps captain pushed aside the bullet-riddled door which hung from one hinge. He stepped out, squinting into the bright light. Another young lad, as so many were in those days, early twenties, Harry guessed, trying to hide his baby face behind a meager line of fuzz along his upper lip. Bennett looked over at Harry and Ryan, then back to the scarred cottage. He took off his cap and ran a hand over the close-shaved hair lying atop his skull like a shadow.
“Captain Bennett,” Ryan said, climbing out of the jeep, “I’m Colonel Ryan and this is Major Voss. Judge Advocate’s Bureau, London.”
There was no response from Bennett. He seemed mesmerized by the sight of the cottage.
“Captain Bennett!”
“Yessir,” he said blankly, finally. “Colonel Ryan...yes.”
“And this is Major Voss.”
Bennett tried to shake off his daze. “Judge Advocate’s, you said?”
Ryan nodded.
Bennett let out a long breath. “Christ...” He turned to Ottinger. “Captain — you met Captain Ottinger? Of course. Captain, would you stay with the Greshams?”
Ottinger nodded and went inside.
Bennett stood himself up straight and set his cap levelly back on his head. “I’m from 518th Combat Wing Headquarters. General Halverson’s staff. How much did they tell you?”
Ryan looked at the cottage and shook his head. “Nobody said anything about another St. Valentine’s Massacre. You better take it from scratch, Captain.”
Bennett nodded. He beckoned for Ryan and Harry to follow him to the cliff edge. At the rim, they looked down at choppy water. About ten yards from the pebble beach, an aeroplane wallowed in the low surf. Gaping bullet holes were stitched across the sides of the silver fuselage. The engine cowling had peeled away along one side, and the propeller blades were bent back in twisted mustaches. A metal-wound tether had been tied to the plane and ran to the small beach where a squad of Tommies sat checking the line.
“Thunderbolt?” Ryan squinted at the muscular fuselage.
Bennett nodded.
“What happened?”
“According to the witnesses — ”
“Somebody lived through that?” Harry asked, nodding back at the cottage.
“Two survivors,” Bennett replied. “Early this morning — this is their story — ” He seemed eager to distance himself from the report. “ — three P-47’s are coming in. Ones trailing smoke. That one down there.”
“And it crashed?”
“Not exactly. The witnesses say...Well, they say one of the other planes shot it down.”
“Wait a minute,” said Ryan. “You mean one of these other planes, one of these other American planes — ”
“I’m just telling you what they said. Sir.” Hating the message, Bennett had come to hate the messengers as well as those looking to corroborate it. “I’ve sent for a flatbed truck and a crane. I guess you’ll want the plane for the inquiry.” He led them back toward the cottage. “The old guy is Charles Gresham. It’s him and his wife. He’s a spotter for the Home Defence.”
Harry fumbled a small notepad from his jacket.
“What he says,” Bennett continued, “is the pilot of the plane that downed the other 47, he saw him — saw Gresham and his wife, that is — and made a strafing run on ’em.”
“They’re all right?” Harry asked.
“Shook up quite a bit, but they’re in one piece.”
Harry fingered a bullet hole in one of the stones in the cottage wall as they stepped up to the door. “Says something for good masonry.”
Inside, the front room was freckled with daylight through the punctured roof Dust motes danced in the columns of light. Every step brought the crackle of broken crockery from underfoot. Ottinger was standing by the short, soft form of Mrs. Gresham. She sat in a far corner in the only intact chair, bleached white and shivering despite the woolen Army blanket pulled up to her chin. Charles Gresham was on his stomach near the fireplace. A medical corpsman was probing the old man’s back. With each stab of the corpsman’s fingers, the old man winced and groaned.
“I thought you said he was OK,” Harry whispered to Bennett.
“Threw his back out carrying the body up from the beach.”
“Body?”
Bennett led them past a bullet-riddled curtain into the bedroom. The air here tasted damp and salty. The window curtains had been drawn, but in the spill of light from the door Harry saw splotches of mud and water on the floor leading to a figure on the bed. On the wall above the bed, Harry could pick out a cross in the gloom, suspended upside down, another casualty of the handful of rounds that had found their way into the bedroom.
Bennett went to the night table and lit a hurricane lamp. The blankets beneath the dead man on the bed were black with water and half-dried blood. The smoothness of the dead face — even smoother, now, in the pallor of death — bespoke youth, another fresh-faced warrior. The eyes were partially open, making him look bored and unconcerned and, even in the low light of the lamp, Harry could make out dark circles under the dead boy’s eyes. The hair and clothes were still damp, the flight coveralls splattered with large, rust-colored stains. Someone had pulled his flight kit clear and it sat, dripping, in a puddle on the floor. Ryan stepped closer to study the body, but Harry remained in the doorway.
Bennett went to the curtained window, lighting a cigarette. “Positive identification: O’Connell, Dennis F., 015392. Blood type, O positive. Catholic. I left his tags on him for Graves Registration. He’s...He was a second lieutenant with the 351st Fighter Group, 518th Wing, out of Donophan Airfield. That’s not far from here, maybe an hour’s drive.” Harry kept his eyes on his notebook and note-taking so he wouldn’t have to look up and see the corpse. “You, um, did you ID the other — ”
Bennett nodded and pulled out a notebook of his own. “Major Albert Markham and Captain Jon-Jacob Anderson. Both with the 351st.”
“They’re being held?”
“In quarters. Whole field’s been sealed up.”
“You OK? Harry?” It was Ryan. “You don’t look so — ”
“The heat, the trip out. I’ll, um, be outside.”
Ryan nodded and Harry stepped back into the front room to a sight that brought him up short. The corpsman had Gresham on his feet in what looked like a choke hold. He pulled the old man’s head up and back, almost lifting his feet off the floor, until there was an audible crack of vertebrae slipping back into place. The old man sighed with relief.
“Better, sir?” The corpsman set Gresham down on the edge of the raised hearth. “Good. Me dad’s the same way.” The corpsman was a flame-haired, ruddy-faced man, large and blocky but with careful, supple hands, and older than Harry thought an enlisted man should be, particularly in light of all the youngsters running round with officer’s pips on their epaulets. Harry was unaware, at the time, of how rarely young officers lived to be old officers. “Guess ’e’s made me an old ’and at it,” the corpsman told Gresham. “You just go easy for a bit.”
Harry turned to the other side of the cottage, nudging the pile of smashed metal and tubes that had been a wireless with the tip of his shoe. He knelt and picked out the decapitated head of a porcelain sheep. He set it back down in the debris, stood, his knees cracking, and found himself facing the riddled recognition poster on the wall.
Something he half heard from the bedroom brought him out of his musing and he heard Ryan saying, “Yeah, there was something about Donophan buzzing around the quad. Didn’t I hear Lord Haw Haw say something about it?”
“Maybe,” Bennett told Ryan. “Krauts h
it ’em pretty bad about a week ago. Planted a lot of gold stars that night. They didn’t need this on top of it.” The lamp went out and Bennett led Ryan back into the front room.
Ottinger was bent close over the old woman. “Yes,” he nodded to her soft words. “I’ll tell them. Not to worry.” He made a show for her of going to the open front door. “Here, you men! Have a care there! Out of the garden now! You’re tramping it all up!” He turned back to the old woman and smiled comfortingly. “All right, missus?”
Harry noticed Ryan watching him, and only then did it occur to him that the next move was his. Harry walked over to the old man.
“How’s your back, Mr. Gresham?”
“Still ’urts a bit.”
“We’ll see what we can have done for you. Mr. Gresham, I’m Major Voss of the U.S. Army, and this is Colonel Ryan. Can you tell me what happened here?”
“I awready tol’ ’im!” the old man said coldly, pointing at Ottinger. “’N’ ’im!” Bennett this time. “I’ve had me fill o’ tellin’ it! ’n’ if you don’t mind me sayin’ so, I’ve ’bout ’ad me fill o’ Yanks today as well, thank you!”
Harry looked over at Ryan. Ryan continued to give him a ball’s-in-your-court-Harry-boy look.
Harry’s knees cracked again as he knelt by the old man. “Mr. Gresham, I know how you must feel right — ”
“Do you, now, laddie? Lemme tell you sumpin’. I been spottin’ ’ere for more ’n’ three years. I serve me country. I’ll die for me King if ol’ George asks me. But the first time I gets meself shot at, it’s from one o’ you!” His finger shot out and stopped just short of Harry’s chest. “Do you know how that feels?”
“No. You’re right, Mr. Gresham, I don’t. But the only way these men are going to be punished, the men who did this to you and your wife, is for me to find out everything I can about what happened. That means you telling me this story, and you’re probably going to have to tell it a number of times after this. I’ll do whatever I can to make it as easy on you as possible, but...I don’t think either of us really has a choice, do you?”
The old man closed his eyes. “’S all so bloody confusin’.”