Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Nine

December 15, 1944. Lepont, Belgium. Friday, 1700 Hours.

Snow continued to fall heavily over the Ardennes. The sky stayed dark and overcast and the clouds were weighted with moisture. Sleeting storms developed with erratic violence across the terrain held by the American VIII Corps.

Snow packed the chinks of sandbagged revetments, froze the breechblocks of cannons, numbed the faces of soldiers and caused gale warnings to fly along the Channel ports from Ostend to Zeebrugge and down the canal systems of Europe into the tributaries of the Rhine.

The bitter weather swept across lakes and woodlands of the Ardennes, driving what was left of the livestock to cover, forcing starving goats and sheep to huddle together for warmth behind foothills covered with bracken that was as hard and cold as iron. Root crops had been scarce that year. Beets and potatoes were frozen in the fields, the woods thinned by the occupying troops. Great stands of maples and oaks were gone; without these windbreaks the countryside was nakedly exposed to winter gales.

The labor force had been conscripted by the German Army, the diamond and glass and flax industries no longer functioned, and the bulk of food for human consumption came from painstakingly nurtured garden plots, chiefly sustained by human manure, a commodity also in dangerously short supply.

On the banks of the Salm near Lepont the ground had been beaten flat and hard. Across this frozen earth, once thick with silver birch and wild fruit orchards, the winds raced unchecked through the streets of the village. It shook the old panes of Denise Francoeur’s brick home, where Jocko Berthier had camouflaged the entrance to the stone cellar, a vaulted enclosure directly below the parlor.

Working by candlelight with the blackout curtains drawn tightly. Jocko had removed the locks and hinges of the cellar door, filling the screw holes with putty and whitewashing the door panels to match the color and texture of the parlor walls. He’d then wedged the door back into place, fitting it closely and snugly with strips of felt.

From a poster of his own ancient bed. Jocko had sawed a wooden angel’s head and attached it by a bolt and screw to a cross panel in the cellar door. The illusion of a smooth, unbroken white wall, relieved only by the shining angel’s head, was completed when Denise placed a table in front of the whitewashed door and decorated it with a lace cloth and pewter candlesticks. The gracefully carved angel’s head was painted blue and white with delicately ridged blond hair and a small pink mouth formed in gentle curves. The eyes of the angel were blank and round, and firelight touched them with a suggestion of sightless innocence.

Later that same afternoon a V-1 in a formation heading toward Liège developed a misfunction and tipped to earth short of its target, exploding in the woods above Lepont and missing by a few dozen yards the gatehouse of a castle that had been occupied until recently by German officers.

From her parlor Denise had watched the robot bomb flash across the skies and curve down into the woods above the village. She went quickly into the bedroom, where Margret, her dark hair fanned out against the pillow, her breathing deep and uneven, was sleeping. There was a look of pain on the child’s small, cramped features, and tears had started beneath her eyelids and glistened on her cheeks even while she slept.

Denise woke her niece gently and led her down to the cellar, where there was a cot, candles, ajar of water and some writing paper and crayons.

“If anyone knocks, you won’t come up?”

The child shook her head.

“Promise me.”

The little girl nodded and her aunt left her, collected her cloak and went into the village.

When she located Jocko Berthier he grumbled, as she’d known he would, but at last pulled on his sheepskin coat and started with her up the winding road, flanked on one side by black trees and on the other by a sheer drop into the valley. Above them, arches and turrets dark against the dull afternoon, they could see Castle Rěve standing on one of twin peaks; the second promontory, slightly higher than the castle hill, was known as Mont Reynard.

At the top of the road they sighted the castle gatehouse, smoke drifting from its chimneys. A crater a dozen yards wide had been torn in the frozen earth above it; small fires still crackled in the underbrush.

Paul Bonnard stood with his back to his stone house, facing the flames with an ax in his hands. His wife, Trude, was collecting shards of glass from the ground and placing them in a reed basket. The flesh of her right cheekbone lay open and a thin stream of blood ran unevenly down to her mouth.

“She was at the window when it fell,” Bonnard said. “But it wasn’t the glass that cut her. It was the clock. The blast knocked it off the shelf into her face.”

The Bonnards were close to shock, Denise saw, Trude’s gestures clumsy and reflexive and Bonnard gripping his ax and watching the flames as if they were animals that might suddenly turn and attack his home.

Denise and Jocko helped Madame Bonnard into the gatehouse and to a chair at the fireplace. They told Felice Bonnard, who was sixteen, to bring warm water and some clean cloths.

Later, when Felice took her mother upstairs, Paul Bonnard motioned to Jocko and Denise to follow him outside, where he proceeded up a cart trail that curved into the woods above the crater made by the V-1. He stopped in a glade, pointing into the crown of a tree where a body was suspended by the straps of a tangled parachute, the head twisted at a sharp angle, the legs turning slowly with the winds.

They thought at first the dead man was an American soldier — the helmet was a gray-green, the overcoat brown — but when the wind moved the body, they could see under the open overcoat the field-gray color of a German uniform and the shine of SS insignia.

“Have you seen others?” Jocko asked.

“No, only this man. We heard planes sometime in the night—”

“We’d better bury him,” Jocko said.

Bonnard brought the ax and a shovel from the gatehouse and he and Jocko hacked out a grave. Denise put the soldier’s automatic handgun and wallet in the pocket of her cloak and, after Jocko marked the grave with stones, they started back to the village, the shadows of the castle and Mont Reynard mingling with their own on the road down to the silver edge of the river.

“Can you send a signal?” she said.

Jocko shook his head. “I worked on the transmitter yesterday but Father Juneau came up to the choir loft. I wasn’t expecting him.”

“What do you think he knows?”

“Everything he can get his hands on, you can be sure of that.”

Denise Francoeur made the sign of the cross on her forehead and slipped her cold hands into the folds of her cloak.