All the lights above us, p.8
All the Lights Above Us, page 8
Instead, he raised his hand in the V for Victory sign, and flashed her a toothy, tobacco-stained grin.
The Resistance. Madame Vion had activated the Maquisards. Now they would slow down the German defenses any way they could.
The blue-handkerchief resister turned to his fellow Maquisards and gave a sharp call through his lips. The entire group split up and darted to various hiding places. Just as they disappeared into the underbrush, an explosion lashed through the countryside. The earth rose under it like an angry monster. Metal rail lines squealed and curved under its weight. Many of them snapped in half like toothpicks.
Flora collapsed into the mud, her bicycle landing hard on top of her. She curled in a ball and covered her neck with her arms while pieces of rail tie, mud, and rail spikes showered the ground all around her.
When the reverberations died away, machine-gun fire cracked through the rail station. It shattered the windows and tore up the platform. Then came a sharp whistle blast, and a piercing shout in German.
A fierce battle between Maquisards and the Wehrmacht began. Precise German automatic fire met with haphazard pistol bullets and rifle blasts. Yelps of pain and roars of fury rang all around the depot. A soldier dropped here, and a resister dropped there.
In the midst of hell for a second time, Flora crawled to her feet. She made a useless brush at the mud plastered to her clothes. The melee had smashed her last remaining cigarettes too. She picked up the soggy packet and tried to clean it off.
“God damn it …” She shoved the pack into her pocket and hopped back on her bicycle.
She pedaled hard for Caen.
Adelaide
NORMANDY COUNTRYSIDE
Adelaide had been walking in the muddy Norman lowlands for some time, picking her way through the mucky fields, tapping Henning’s old compass, and struggling to make sense of her direction and surroundings. But she felt even more lost when she took a step forward onto what looked like solid ground, only to splash knee deep into slimy, filthy water.
She shrieked, barely keeping her balance, flinching and cursing with both the shock and cold. In a frustrated huff, she yanked her sopping limbs out of the muck and struggled to wring the stinking swamp water out of her brown skirt. Then she stood up straight and took a hard look at the vast expanse before her.
In the eerie, misty, early morning light, it looked like a place more fit for nightmares. Still, soupy water, coated with a thick layer of mossy algae, had turned this naturally marshy place into a toad-colored, flooded-out bog. Empty, tattered parachutes were splayed out all across it. Some had been snagged on twisted tree branches, their wires creaking in the stiff breeze. Some coiled up in the water like frozen jellyfish, partially submerged in the pond. Ghostly blue lights also pierced through the water, attached to what looked like crates and barrels of supplies. Badly needed supplies that had sunk into the swamp, where they would be of no use to anyone.
And then there were the bodies. Bloodied corpses in American uniforms, all of them face down, some already bloated. Their pilots had clearly mistaken the bog for solid ground. An understandable error, given the thick topcoat of algae. And the paratroopers, weighed down by guns, ammunition packs, and heavy uniforms, hadn’t stood a chance in that water.
Adelaide felt her stomach knot up and her breakfast roil inside of her. She buried her face in her hands to try and calm her nausea, but it didn’t shield her from the wretched smell emanating from the bog. Putrid, rotting algae mixed with the sharp odor of decaying flesh.
She took a horrified step back, only to have her heel jabbed by a hard metal object in the grass. It poked right through her flimsy boot soles and into the fleshy bottoms of her feet.
Crying out in both pain and anger, Adelaide clawed the object out of the earth and turned it in her fingers.
It was small enough to fit in her pocket, with hollow brass shaped like a rectangular whistle. The ends stuck out to form a small clicker. A “US” stamp identified where it came from, but not exactly what it was.
She ran her finger over those two letters. No one could hide from it now. The Americans and all their might had arrived on French soil. The paratroopers in her town, the flaming planes, and the bodies in the bog reminded her that many had already died for freedom. She wondered what purpose this bizarre little piece played in such a mighty endeavor. She also took a good look around, making sure none of that mighty endeavor would find her if this object made any noise.
When she felt sure the dead bodies were her only company, and that the mystery object wouldn’t explode, she pressed the ends of the trinket together. An audible cricket chirp came out.
“What the …?” She shook the piece and pressed the clicker again. The same chirp pierced the silence. Despite all the ugliness around her, her cracked lips pulled into a grin.
All the crickets she had heard the night before had astounded her. It was early in the season for so many of them, and it gave her a distinct feeling of foreboding. But it wasn’t crickets. It was the vast army of American paratroopers trying to find each other in the dark.
She clicked the cricket chirp again, and a pitiful voice came from nearby.
“Help me …”
As if she had been caught stealing, Adelaide threw the clicker down and her eyes darted across the lonely, silent swamp.
Everything was still. The bodies remained face down in the swamp. There was only the quiet dripping of water from nearby and the whisper of moist grass.
Just when she thought she must have gone mad, the swamp water in front of her split apart in a violent splash. A human head and a pair of shoulders broke the surface. A sputtering cough escaped from the depths of a man’s soaked hair and drenched clothes.
“Help me!”
A young paratrooper was locked in a lethal battle with his weighed-down uniform and the slimy water. He gasped for air and flung his mud-covered arms. After a few seconds of wrestling, the water pulled him under again. The algae moved back over the opening. A tattered, silky parachute was the only sign that anything had disturbed the bog.
It was also a sign of the boy’s predicament. Clearly it had somehow pinned him beneath the water, only letting him surface at intervals for precious gulps of oxygen. Who knows how long he had been there, fighting the thing that had been designed to bring him safely to earth?
Adelaide didn’t need to be told twice what to do. She tossed her bag on the ground, digging through its meager contents with hurried flicks of her wrists and determined focus in her eyes. She found the small knife Henning had packed for her and slipped it into her waistband. Then she rolled her brown skirts up as far as she could. She timidly dipped her legs into the icy, muddy sludge.
It felt like chilled, rotted jelly against her tired old legs, but she put it out of her mind and forged ahead, fighting the muck that pulled at her skirt and boots. Muck that got deeper and deeper as she approached the struggling boy. The vague notion that she was in grave danger rolled through her mind, but she ignored it.
She couldn’t let him die like this.
By the time she touched the edge of his parachute, the water came up to her bust. She folded the silk over, scanning the murky swamp for any sign of its owner.
He suddenly burst to the surface and almost knocked her over in his panic. “Help me!”
Adelaide recovered fast and grabbed his slimy hand before he went back under. She yanked on him with all her body weight, and he wriggled and squirmed to keep his face above water. His green eyes were wild with fright. The water had tinted his lips blue and wrinkled his skin. He must have been trapped in this death struggle for quite some time.
“The ropes …,” he said as the water closed in on his face. “They’re caught underneath, and they’re pulling me—” He took a final gulp of air before he sank under the surface again, pulled down by his tangled parachute cords.
Adelaide whipped the knife out and snapped through the dizzying web of parachute lines. Her frozen fingers moved at half the speed she needed them to. Her joints screamed in pain, no longer used to working this hard. Just when she thought her hands would lock up with arthritis, the final bit of harness pulled away from the chute. The boy burst back to the surface, at last free from his bondage.
While he struggled to catch up on oxygen, Adelaide wrapped her arm around his waist, and put one of his arms around her shoulders. With her human cargo in tow, she grappled with the stubborn swamp to keep both of them on their feet. At last, while water and stink poured down her skirt in buckets, she plopped the soldier onto the muddy yet solid ground next to her old carpetbag. Then she crawled out of the sludge and knelt beside him.
He convulsed from head to toe, his teeth chattering loud enough to wake his dead mates.
She wrapped her arms around his slimy form and situated his head on her lap. “There now, you must be freezing.”
He coughed up a little more water while his quakes dissipated into manageable shivers. “Madame, you saved my life!”
Mustering her best English, she smiled. “All in a day’s work.”
“I’ve been stuck in there for hours. Christ almighty. I couldn’t believe when I hit water instead of solid ground. My head went under and my ankles flew up, then the cords wrapped around me. Luckily I got my face above water but not much else. Thought I was done for until I heard you use that damn cricket chirp.”
She noted the soaked American flag patch on his ripped uniform sleeve. “Well, we couldn’t have that. Vive l’américain.”
Her sunny attitude poked through his fear, and he managed a boyish grin. “Thanks to you, anyway.”
She assisted him to his feet while he squeezed the swamp out of his dripping clothes. As he did so, he took in his dead comrades and tried to keep from crying. “Those bastard, dumb ass pilots. I’ll have their scrawny little necks for dropping us in this shit hole!”
The harsh sentiment stung Adelaide, the burning planes she had seen in the night flashing through her mind. The horrid smoke trails that lingered in the sky. The flaming wreckage sinking down to earth. It would be just as awful a death as drowning in a swamp.
And as horribly tragic as each death was, she knew they weren’t done yet. Many more would die in the days ahead, whether they flew planes, dropped in parachutes, or walked across a boggy countryside just to reach their only child. Getting mad at any of them wouldn’t take that away. With an exhausted sigh, she put a gentle hand on his arm.
“They didn’t drop you here on purpose,” she said. “Besides, normally it’s not water. Muddy and marshy, but not flooded. The Germans must have opened the river locks.”
The boy ran a hand through his swampy-smelling hair and turned away from her. Biting his jaw to keep his emotions at bay, he tore through his many pockets for supplies that survived his brush with death. All he found were a few saturated boxes of cigarettes and a completely spoiled candy bar.
Adelaide’s heart melted. “Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
She opened her bag and pulled out a small loaf of dry, stale bread. It wasn’t much, but it was the best she could do. She ripped it down the middle and handed half to the ravenous American soldier.
He wolfed it down without stopping for breath. “My first meal in France.” He licked the crumbs off his dirty fingers. “How do we get out of this mess, anyway?”
The boy’s question reminded Adelaide that it wasn’t just him in a predicament. The bog looked vast and unending. She had no way of knowing how deep the water got. Forging ahead would be far too great a risk, but going around could burn precious time in her quest to get to her daughter. She put her hands on her hips and frantically turned the wheels in her head, struggling to remember the many side roads and byways in these parts.
“There’s supposed to be a main highway somewhere around here, yes?” the boy asked.
She shook her head. “It’s too far back, and I have to get to the coast.”
The boy drilled a hard gaze into her. “The coast? Are you mad?”
“My daughter is all alone with her baby. They need my help.”
Her plight didn’t move him. “Pretty soon hell itself is going to drop on that coast. You’d be an idiot to go that way.”
“I won’t leave my daughter alone there.”
“A battlefield is no place for an old woman, you hear me?”
The comment slapped her like the cold of the bog water.
Old woman …
She looked down at her gnarled hands and ran a few tired fingers over her wrinkled face. Her vision felt blurry where it was once crystal clear. Her fine hair looked gray instead of silver these days. Her limbs were a lot more sore than they used to be.
He was right, wasn’t he? Somewhere along the line, between two world wars and a few smaller ones in her own house, Adelaide had become an old woman.
Sensing that he had hurt her feelings, the soldier put his hand on her hunched back. “You’re a brave woman. But still, you can’t go to the coast. No woman should go to that coast. It’s too dangerous.” Convinced that settled it, he began scrounging some equipment off the dead soldiers.
But his words only rankled her more. Adelaide stewed to herself while the gut-swirling smell sank into her clothes and drying mud turned her skirt into a stiff, solid block.
The anger surprised her, because that soldier had said nothing she didn’t agree with. She always believed a woman’s place was in her nest tending to her young ones. It was woman’s role in this crazy world to bring up a new generation in love and understanding, to wipe away all these wars. The soldier said it in a different way, but the core values were the same.
Shame took root alongside the frustration in the pit of Adelaide’s stomach, and she wasn’t sure why at first. Maybe it was the tone of his voice, so haughty and arrogant. Maybe it was the irony of having her own advice slung at her. Or maybe it was because she had just saved him from drowning, so he had no right to tell her what she was capable of.
It wasn’t the first time she had heard such talk from her male counterparts, either. Men always tried to poke their nose in her business. Her husband delighted in telling her how to raise her daughter, how to cook the meals, and how to tend to the house. He had no problem barking orders, but when she offered to let him do it himself, suddenly it was “women’s work.” He had “more important” things to do. Much like this war, they loved to make the mess, but they didn’t revel in cleaning it up, did they?
She wrinkled her nose into a hard frown, and she noticed the corner of Georgette’s picture sticking out from her bag. A ray of understanding seeped in through years of conviction and ideals. It made her bow her head in disappointment. Not with the soldier, but with herself.
She had never understood Georgette’s ways. It made no sense why her daughter would want to work in addition to raising children. Now she felt as if she’d just had a glimpse inside Georgette’s mind. Her daughter wasn’t stubborn, she was brave. She took on years worth of tradition and exposed the falsehoods in it. She confronted attitudes like that soldier’s. She wanted to prove that no matter what a man did, a woman could do it too, even with a child on her hip.
Adelaide sighed and ran her finger over the silver picture frame. She should have stood aside a long time ago and let Georgette become her own woman. Maybe now she could make it up to her by taking a page from her modern book.
She stood up tall and didn’t break her gaze from the soldier boy. “There’s a small thoroughfare. A side road. Not far from here. It runs parallel to the coast. We can take that way.”
He snapped his head up at her. “We?”
“Unless you brought a boat with you.”
The soldier looked ready to give her a real piece of his mind, but both of them froze when a chorus of thuds and reverberations rocked the air, the trees, and the swampy ground at their feet. Shrieks and explosions cut through the morning gloom. Flashes flickered across the horizon. All coming directly from the coast.
“More planes?” Adelaide asked.
The Soldier shook his head. “Nope. That’s a naval bombardment.” He let that hang in the air for a moment, then he turned to Adelaide. “No way in hell I’m going to that coast, lady. You’re on your own.”
Theda
VAD DORMITORY
PORTSMOUTH, ENGLAND
While France fell apart across the choppy Channel, Theda sat in the much more composed VAD dormitory. Girls went about their morning routines while somber, gray daylight struggled through the windows lining the dreary brick walls. Rain pattered against the glass and blurred the city view outside. A dormant fireplace did nothing to alleviate the dampness in the wide, dank room.
Theda, dressed in the blue skirt of her VAD uniform, sat on her own squeaky, narrow bed with a thick medical volume on her lap. Her long hair formed a curtain around her shoulders, and a cool cup of watery tea rested on the table beside her.
On the bed right next to hers, Sheila gripped a hand mirror with one hand. With the other, she applied a coat of fire engine red lipstick with all the precision of a surgeon. Carolyn squished beside Sheila and picked at her already pristine blonde hair.
All three girls tried to ignore the radio, which blared from across the room. Only a droll classical sound came from the large cathedral-like set. The violin strings couldn’t have been wound as tightly as the ward sister’s nerves, though. Eliza, always strict and well put together, looked as if she’d come to pieces if someone dropped a pin. Now fully dressed in her stiff, conservative, and complete uniform, with her hair swept back under a starched nurse’s cap, she paced the floor with a fist in her mouth and waited for any updates.
“Do you think they’ll start dances at the pub around the corner soon?” Carolyn asked, wrapping a strand of her hair around her finger.
Theda didn’t look up from her reading. “Who would you dance with? All the boys are gone. And they were holed up in those barracks long before today.”
“I’m sure some stayed behind,” Sheila said.
