CHAPTER EIGHTPrisoners
AS A very small boy, riding on the broad platform of La Fumée’s back had been André’s delight. But La Fumée had not then quivered at the whine and roar of shells, or the nerve-shaking rattle of machine guns. And the fields had not been spiked with wicked barbed-wire glider traps.
“Now, we zigzag,” explained Victor as he turned the mare into a hedge-lined path at the next field. It was necessary to round barns and ponds and areas marked in German: “Achtung—Minen!” “Beware—Mines!” to avoid even the smaller country roads.
They covered nearly a mile at the Percheron’s steady plod. Then a shell crashed a hundred yards away, and the horse cowered under a shower of falling debris. Victor and André had flattened themselves on the Percheron’s vast back. With hishead still buried in Victor’s rough coat, André begged, “Surely it is wiser to turn back, Victor.”
The old man sighed. “But it is now such a little way. It is a pity.”
Both sat up cautiously.
The marshes glowed beyond a broken orchard, just across the Paris-Cherbourg road. Far to the northeast, from a German pillbox sunk beside the flooded land, swiveled guns thumped, and were immediately answered by other, unseen guns.
Before they could move again, André cried, “Listen!”
A tremendous explosion, close to the sea, was followed by a shattering series of rolling reverberations. And immediately, from almost on the horizon, a fleet of planes swept upward sharply over their heads.
“Dive bombers,” André cried. “They must be finishing off those big German guns on the sea bluff.”
Then, added to the shock and noise of the bombing, rose all around them a fury of gobbling protest. Turkeys which had been roosting in the trees screamed and fluttered insanely. In the grass, a family of small white pigs ran helter-skelter toward the hedges.
La Fumée stood stiff, with rolling eyes.
At length the last wave of bombers passed. The air over the orchard reeked, and smoke seeped inland from the marshes.
The turkeys continued to scold, their voices dropping to an angry gurgle.
“There, that is over,” Victor said firmly. “Jacquard’s is so close, we may as well go on.”
La Fumée moved woodenly, and André smoothed her thick, firm flank with a gentle hand.
If they were to go on, they must cross the wide, pitted Paris-Cherbourg road. And into this angled a smaller one. This led to Jacquard’s, and continued seaward to the hamlet of l’Audouville.
The road stretching north and south was completely deserted just then except for a litter of wrecked Nazi trucks pushed to the sides.
La Fumée put on a jiggling burst of speed to cross the main road. The smaller road also seemed empty.
“You see,” Victor said. “Here we are. Jacquard’s place is just ahead.”
André’s sharper eyes studied the high stone walls and the slate roofs above. “It has been bombed or shelled already,” he said.
Victor hunched forward, shocked into silence.
The farm’s roadside gates sagged open on broken hinges, and fowl wandered in and out.
The sound of a car racing up the main road to Cherbourg caught André’s ear. As he turned, he saw the car hesitate at the fork of their road, and then swing into it at gathering speed.
He thrust his hand under Victor’s arm, grabbed the reins, and yanked the Percheron into the shallow ditch at the side.
The car swept past so fast, André caught only a glimpse of the Nazi Swastika on the side.
Nearing the broken gate, the Nazi driver slowed uncertainly. But instantly he swung into a teetering turn, and shot into the barnyard in the midst of an uproar of cackling hens and geese.
There was a muffled crash.
André and Victor slid quickly from La Fumée’s back with thumping hearts.
“They are trapped,” André whispered, “and do not know how to get out. We must bring some soldiers before they come out.”
Victor was loosening his shotgun with tremblinghands. But his experience with farmyards now served him well.
“Without a doubt, those Nazi officers have run spank into the manure pile,” he stated with satisfaction. “They will find some troublesomeness getting loose.” He took a step forward. “You must run quickly for help.”
André thought, “The first of the soldiers from the landing barges must surely be coming across the causeways by now. Captain Dobie said they would.”
Skittering along past the gate into the grassy edge of the road, he began to run toward l’Audouville as fast as his legs would carry him.
Racing against time, André could not look back. Before he reached the turn his heart leaped.
A soldier, bulky with equipment, was coming toward him. He was moving cautiously along the roadside, rifle poised. And fanning out behind him was a spaced line of Americans.
André dashed toward them.
Unsmiling and with leveled gun, the first soldier yelled, “Halt!” He then said rapidly in French, “Who are you? Andwhere’reyou going?”
André pointed back to the Jacquard farm. “Nazi officers back there. Come get them quick—please.”
Beckoning, he turned to run.
“Just a minute there,” the soldier shouted. “Come back here,petit garçon. What’s this you’re talking about?”
André was terrified by the wasted minutes.
He shouted, “Come!A car full of Nazi officers just drove into a farmyard back there.Hurry!You can take them, buthurry.”
The scattered scouting party began to move ahead warily.
“It’s a chance the kid is okay,” the sergeant called back. “We’ll have to take a look. Keep your eyes open—and keep separated.”
The sergeant quickened his pace, but cautioned, “Take it easy, kid. Let us get ’em.”
Before they reached the Jacquard gate, sheltered by bushes, André fell to his knees and crept toward it.
He had not quite reached it when two quick shotgun blasts rang out.
“That’s Victor’s gun,” he said. “The Nazis must have started to leave.”
Shot rattled on metal, and the tail of the Nazi car smashed through the gates. But, halfway through, the car teetered sharply into the stone post. Rocking, it toppled over and skidded to a stop.
A voice shouted toward the car, “Hold it. Get out and keep your hands up!” A Tommy gun chattered across the car’s spinning wheels.
Scrambling boots pounded into action. The German officers were jerked up and out through the door. André was startled to see a colonel’s insignia on one officer’s shoulders.
When the Nazis were all on their feet, the sergeant’s men surrounded them. Two soldiers relieved the officers of their side arms.
As the shock of their capture wore off, the Nazis began to protest curtly, and the sergeant retorted in their own language.
“Okay. You’re staff officers! We’ll get you to the proper authorities just as soon as we can.”
André had seen plenty of Germans, but few of such high rank.
Suddenly it dawned on him that it was Victor’s shots which had made the capture possible by wrecking the car. But where was Victor?
André ran around the farm buildings, but neither Victor nor La Fumée was in sight—anywhere.
Shells had blasted the carpentry shop, and rubbish lay over the scattered, twisted, and blackened tools.
After a thorough search, André stumbled sadly out to the courtyard and around the scattered manure pile, toward the group at the gate.
He was greeted by a shout from a jeep which had driven up. “Hi, there. You—boy!”
An American lieutenant sat at the wheel, withthe two Nazi officers crammed rigidly in the rear seat. An American with a Tommy gun perched backward on each of the front mudguards, and the German driver, his arm in a sling, shared the front seat with the lieutenant.
Impatiently, the lieutenant asked André whether he knew where the nearest U. S. headquarters had been set up.
André pointed up the road and replied, with some pride, that there was an 82nd Command Post in his own house. “It’s a little more than a mile up that way,” he said.
The lieutenant grinned. “Well, hop in and show us the way.”
André stood stubbornly firm. “But Lieutenant,”he protested, “I came with Victor. He’s an old man. I can’t leave him here.”
“Get in,” snapped the lieutenant. “You can find him later. There’s a war on.”
“As if I didn’t know,” André thought crossly.
But he climbed over the great booted legs of the guard, and hunched in under the elbow of the German prisoner.
The jeep lurched into gear and roared down the road.