Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  Still bent over the boy, Anne-Marie hummed a few bars of “Frère Jacques” to try and keep him immobile while her grandfather sprinkled some of their dwindling supply of sulfanilamide powder on his facial wounds.

  When she straightened, she glanced out the operating room window and saw artillery flashing like heat lightning in the July dusk. The Germans, in a furious fight to hold their ground, were laying waste to the countryside. Wheatfields were pocked with shell craters and cows lay dead in the pastures. All that remained of her uncle’s apple orchard were a few green leaves and twisted branches where his proudly tended trees had once stood.

  The Allies would save France. Of that, Anne-Marie was certain. But sadly, she thought as she watched her grandfather peel off his surgical gloves and square his shoulders before going out to talk to Monsieur Tardieu, no one could save little André’s sight.

  * * * *

  Somewhere in Normandy

  The village looked deserted. But looks could be deceiving, as Mike Scanlon had learned the hard way these past seven weeks. And small actions could easily turn into big conflagrations.

  “Stop here,” he ordered his driver on the edge of town.

  Mike had already reported to the commander of the infantry division that he was going to shoot for and received an update on the mission. They’d gone in to mop up a friendly village, only to find that the Germans wanted it back. Now, using their artillery regiment, his job was to make sure that they didn’t get it back.

  “I’m going to scout around a little bit.” Wearing his map case and carrying both his rifle and 536 radio, he jumped out of the jeep. He’d left his musette bag with his tank crew. It contained his first mail from home—birthday cards from his family, a birth announcement from Kitty Brown containing a picture of his new godson-by-proxy, John, Jr., and a thank you note from Charlie and Daisy Miller for the cash wedding present he’d sent them. Later, if there was a later, he would answer them all.

  “I’ll go with you, Lieutenant,” his driver offered.

  But the redheaded corporal, who looked barely old enough to shave, was Mike’s third driver since the landing. His first had been killed by stray shrapnel from the rolling barrage the battalion had laid down for the crossing of the Vire-Taute Canal, while the second had asked to be reassigned after that close quarter defensive action at St. Jean-de-Daye—an action that had earned Mike a Bronze Star with a V for valor.

  “No.” Something was going to happen very soon, Mike could feel it in his bones, and he didn’t like it one damn bit. Plus, he didn’t want to lose another driver. “Keep the motor running and I’ll relay the coordinates back to you.”

  The dominant building, as it was in all of the Norman villages he’d been in, was a church of square-cut stone with a tall, slender steeple stretching into the sky.

  Seeing that steeple, he wondered why no one had bothered to shoot it off. It was the only logical point of observation for miles around. When the American infantry came through, thinking the town had been cleaned out, the German observer would be able to adjust fire right down on top of them.

  He made a note of the coordinates on his map and then he wondered which way to turn—right or left?

  Following his instincts, he turned right, went around to the back of a house in a long row of houses, and edged his way in a cautious crabwalk to the end. The main street looked empty—too empty to suit him—and the shutters were drawn on those storefronts whose windows hadn’t already been shattered. Which told him that the villagers had either fled in panic or were huddled inside in fear of the battle to come.

  His nerves blade-thin, he dashed across the street, then crept along behind another row of houses. Just beyond the last one, a small bridge spanned a creek. He slowed to an invalid’s walk and peered at it and around it and past it . . . and stopped dead.

  There, not a hundred yards beyond the bridge, in a field by the side of the road, sat a German panzer division.

  As he looked through his binoculars, Mike could smell the heavy diesel odor from their engines hanging in the air. He made radio contact with his driver and gave him the map coordinates. Less than a minute later the artillery regiment fired, the shells screaming over his head on their way to the enemy. Seeing they weren’t exactly on target, he relayed a correction.

  “One-Fox to Fire Direction Center,” he called then. “Fire for effect.”

  The ground trembled under his feet as exploding shells saturated the area. Thick black smoke from the stricken hulk of the closest German tank stung his eyes. The sweet-rancid smell of burning fuel, torn flesh and ruptured earth seared his nostrils.

  Mission accomplished, Mike was just hopping back into the jeep when a bullet hit the hood and bounced harmlessly against the windshield. He glanced up and, sure enough, saw sunlight glinting off the scope of the German artillery observer’s rifle in the church steeple he’d foolishly forgotten to target.

  “Stay here,” he told his terrified driver as he leaped out again. “I’ll be right back.”

  There wasn’t time to call in the coordinates, so he ran inside the church and headed straight for the stairs to the steeple. As the German opened fire on him from his new position in the choir loft, a bullet cut through Mike’s carbine and shattered the stock.

  He felt a burning sting in the side of his neck—from a fragment, he supposed—as he ducked behind the baptismal font. Ignoring the pain, he drew his pistol from the holster of his Sam Browne belt. Then he just crouched there, keeping his eyes focused on the stairway that led to the loft and waiting to see what happened next.

  The silence below proved too tempting for the German to resist. His bootheels made soft scuffing sounds as he crept down the stairs. When he started a pew-by-pew search, Mike held his breath and told himself to be patient. The closer the German got, the easier he’d be to take out.

  Suddenly the church was filled with noise as the jeep driver came bursting through the door and sent it crashing against the back wall.

  The German whirled and shot the corporal.

  At the same time, Mike vaulted to his feet and shot the German. The stone walls echoed the chink of the bullets that hit him, while the crump of artillery drowned out his dying screams.

  “Am I going to live, Lieutenant?” His face white beneath his freckles and his fingers red with blood, the corporal was clutching his shoulder when Mike knelt beside him.

  “To the ripe old age of a hundred, if you’re lucky.” Mike ripped open the uniform shirt that covered the torn flesh and protruding bone and saw that it was probably more than the battalion surgeon could handle. Which meant the corporal would be evacuated back to England and he’d be getting a new driver.

  “I heard shooting, sir, and I got worried about you.”

  Mike felt a crack forming in the protective shell of numbness he’d developed to help him go on day after day. He understood now why the combat veterans in his battalion had kept him at arm’s length when he’d joined them in England. And why he hadn’t allowed himself to get too close to anyone, not even his tank crew, since the landing. With death just a fact of life in front-line combat, he didn’t want to wind up losing any more friends.

  “And now you’ve got the ‘million-dollar wound’.” He didn’t have any sulfa powder with him, so he took out one of the morphine syrettes he carried on his belt and inserted the needle.

  The corporal winced. “You’re bleeding too, Lieutenant.”

  “It’s just a scratch.” After removing the needle, though, Mike unzipped the collar of his tank suit so that the knitted material wouldn’t stick to his own seeping wound.

  Two blue eyes blinked up at him. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  As angry as he was with the corporal for disobeying orders, Mike was even angrier with himself for letting his emotions get the best of him. He looked away, vowing he wouldn’t make that mistake again, and asked in a gruff voice, “Is the morphine helping yet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then let’s get
the hell out of here.” He slid an arm under the corporal’s good shoulder and half-carried, half-dragged him back to the jeep. After he’d settled him on the passenger side but before he slid behind the wheel, he radioed the coordinates he’d forgotten to relay earlier to the infantry’s artillery regiment.

  Mike felt no satisfaction as he watched the shells hit the church steeple, leaving behind a jagged spire spiking the sky—only a terrible weariness at the waste of it all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ste. Genviève, France

  The feeling of cleanliness was like a rebirth.

  Mike had shaved and taken “whore’s baths” out of his helmet on a regular basis, but he hadn’t been wet all over since that quick shower back at Headquarters Battery about ten days ago.

  Now, standing in the shallows of the lake, he soaped himself from head to toe, scrubbing off the vestiges of mud and blood he’d accumulated in the ensuing battles. He rinsed by wading farther out and diving beneath the cool, clear water, drowning out the sleep-haunting sounds of exploding shells and excruciating screams. Surfacing, he swam back to the bank and brushed his teeth, scouring away the pungent taste of cordite and the clouds of dust he’d been eating with his cold rations.

  The murmurs of the men in their pup tents pitched among the trees and the clang of machinery being worked on rode a warm August breeze as he headed back to his own tent wearing only his dogtags and clean skivvies. His battalion had been pulled out of action for ordinance maintenance and had infiltrated in the middle of the night to make camp in this field. Except for an occasional day in reserve, it was his first real break since his baptism of fire on the beach, and he needed it with every fiber of his being.

  Especially after Mortain, where the German counter-battery had been as heavy and damn near as deadly as anything he’d experienced on D-Day.

  “Monsieur?”

  The softly accented summons caught Mike off-guard. He reached for his pistol, then realized that he wasn’t wearing it. Or much of anything else for that matter, he reminded himself as he pivoted on his bare heel to see who’d called to him.

  If he’d been wearing socks, though, the willowy young woman pushing a bicycle with a patched front tire and a live chicken in the handlebar basket would have knocked them off.

  Observation was second nature to him now, and for the first time since the landing he liked everything he saw. She was wearing a pair of cork-soled sandals with wedged heels, and a sleeveless blue dress that bisected her bare knees and was demurely buttoned to her throat. Tendrils of honey-blonde hair had escaped the heavy knot atop her head and clung damply to her long, slender neck.

  His heart jitterbugged in his chest when she stopped a few feet away from him and lifted her chin. Even without makeup, she was a knockout. Dark brows arched over light brown eyes that were wide and a little wary. Her pale skin wore the natural blush of exertion, and perspiration glistened like dew on an upper lip that was bowed like a Kewpie doll’s.

  She extended a hand that was as clean and delicate-looking as the rest of her. “I’m Anne-Marie Gérard.”

  “You speak English,” he said inanely.

  “But of course!” Her proud smile staggered him like a bare-fisted punch. “And—”

  “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

  Mike ducked into his tent and dropped the flap behind him. He knew it was rude of him to cut her off in mid-sentence like that. Ruder still to leave her with her hand hanging in midair, wondering if he’d lost his everlovin’ mind. Which he probably had, but that was beside the point.

  Because if he’d stayed, he might have done something even worse—like throwing her down on her back and taking her on the ground.

  But what could he expect? He hadn’t had a woman since England, and that had been nothing but a fast financial transaction. A “quid pro quickie,” as he’d jokingly called it in his birthday card to John Brown all those months ago. He’d been sealed in a marshaling camp after that, cut off from the rest of the world while he prepared for the invasion and wrote both his will and what might well be his last letter home.

  Then war had become his all-consuming passion, blurring the lines between moral duty and murder as he’d shelled and maimed and sometimes shot his fellow man to death.

  None of which excused what he’d wanted to do to her.

  Mike really couldn’t explain his reaction, except to say that she was his first contact with something normal since—Christ, he almost couldn’t remember when! That shield of numbness had served him too well, it seemed. At some point he’d quit thinking about yesterday. Quit worrying about tomorrow. He’d quit feeling, too . . . until he’d found himself standing in a summer green field with a girl whose smile had unleashed in him a spasm of half-forgotten sensations and memories of another life.

  Was she still waiting for him? God, he hoped so. He cocked an ear toward the tent flap, listening closely but hearing nothing, then decided there was only one way to find out.

  It took him all of about three minutes to get dressed, because Supply Battery had yet to catch up with the rest of the battalion. He tossed his wet towel and toothbrush in the corner, then put on his cleanest dirty shirt and matching olive drab pants. His field jacket had seen better days, as had his combat boots, but they would have to do for now. Finally, he finger-combed his hair, reminding himself to get it cut when the barber arrived, and then stepped outside.

  “Sorry about that.” He was relieved to see that she was still there. Even more relieved when she smiled her forgiveness of his rude behavior. He jammed his hands in his pockets, where they would be safe, and introduced himself. “I’m Mike Scanlon.”

  Anne-Marie had heard the rumors about the Americans GIs’ preoccupation with sex. And about the Frenchwomen, many of them younger than she, who sold their bodies for a bar of soap or a pack of cigarettes. She didn’t purport to judge any of them because she didn’t know their circumstances. Just so there was no mistaking her intentions, however, she had deliberately kept some distance between herself and the soldier she had spotted from the road.

  She’d spent last night at the farm comforting Henriette, who was still in mourning for her oldest brother, Maurice. Then this morning, after putting the chicken that her grieving aunt had given her to cook for her grandfather’s dinner this evening in the wire basket, she’d started back to the village. It was a clear, calm day, but it was hot enough to make her wonder if anyone she knew was swimming in the lake. Riding past the field, she’d almost driven her bicycle into the ditch when she saw the vehicles with white stars instead of swastikas parked there and the small tents sitting among the trees.

  But the task she had impetuously set for herself at that moment would have been easier if this tall American weren’t so . . . so dangerously attractive.

  Damp brown hair as dark as his eyes had been raked back from a strong face made lean by war. Except for the pale line of demarcation across his forehead, where she presumed his helmet had perched, his skin was bronzed from exposure to the summer sun. His nose was straight, his cheekbones seemingly molded from steel, his chin a monument to both decency and daring. And that smiling mouth, with the dimple beside it, definitely drew her eye.

  As did the breadth of his shoulders beneath the drab, olive-green jacket. There were muscles there; she’d seen them. And that memory, coupled with the remembrance of long, bare legs liberally dusted with dark hair, almost made her forget the reason she had approached him in the first place.

  Searching for something less distracting to focus on, she looked at the silver bars, one each, pinned to his epaulets. “You are an officer?”

  “A first lieutenant, yes.” Mike had received a battlefield promotion last month, after the all-night pyrotechnics he’d sent crashing down on Cerisy-la-Salle.

  “Then I should call you 'sir’!”

  “Only if you want me to call you 'ma’am’.”

  The chicken in her handlebar basket cackled at his comeback and they laughed together, their ey
es clinging even after their smiles had faded.

  “Mike,” she agreed shyly.

  His dimple reappeared. “Anne-Marie.”

  “Is Mike your . . .” She faltered, trying to think of the right word. “Knickknack?”

  He took a wild guess. “Nickname?”

  “Oui!”

  “Yes.”

  She bristled at his teasing smile but stood her ground. “You’re making fun with me.”

  “No,” he said, genuinely contrite. But he wished . . . God, how he wished!

  A burst of raucous laughter erupted from the far side of the bivouac area, where the enlisted men had pitched their tents. Somebody bellowed, “Vin!” Someone else bawled, “Cherchez la femme!” A chorus of lusty voices, closer by, began singing, “Roll me o-ver . . . Roll me o-ver! Roll me over, lay me down and do it again!”

  She stole a glance in that direction, and he felt his gut tightening when the wariness returned like a shadow to her expressive amber eyes.

  “Michael.” He stepped sideways, blocking her view of the bivouac area, and succeeded in drawing her worried gaze back to him. “My full name is Michael.”

  “In French we say Michel.” Her smoky voice breathed such exotic new meaning into his name that his mouth watered for more.

  He swallowed before he started drooling all over her. “What can I do for you?”

  Anne-Marie hesitated only because she didn’t want Mike to see her as a beggar. Then she reminded herself that pride was a small price to pay when peoples’ lives were at stake. So she resolved to do what she had come to do, even if it made her look bad in his eyes, and then go home.

  “My grandfather is a doctor,” she began, “and so many of our villagers have been wounded by bombs or bullets—“

  “Collateral damage,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Comment?” she asked in confusion.

  “That’s the military term for civilian casualties.” But Mike would have been the first to admit that it took a tougher nut than he not to be moved by the sight of a small child who’d lost a leg and now used a crutch. Or a mother cradling a crying baby swathed in bandages from head to toes.