CHAPTER 19

The shooting lesson over, the remaining band of snipers packed up and moved out. Lieutenant Mulholland had no clear orders other than to engage the enemy, and so they trudged along the road toward Carentan. The action at the bridge had taken up most of the long June day and already the shadows stretched far and deep across the fields.

After the rush of adrenalin and pounding hearts during the fight, they now felt curiously empty, like a balloon that the helium had gone out of.

It wasn't a feeling that lasted long. They had not gone far when they were overtaken by a Jeep tearing down the dirt road. It was a little unusual to see one of the Jeeps traveling alone. Considering that the woods and fields all around them were still contested by the Allies and Germans, the occupant would have been better off in a Sherman tank or even on foot. The sharp whine of the Jeep engine attracted too much attention. Whoever was at the wheel had to be either desperate or foolish. The vehicle skidded to a stop beside them.

"Ya'll are snipers?" the sergeant at the wheel asked. With the dark circles under his eyes and unshaven face, he had the haggard look of a man who hadn't slept in a while. His eyes went to the telescopic sights of their rifles, and he didn't wait for an answer to his own question. "You could maybe do some good up this road at a little town called Bienville. We took it from the Germans today but they chewed us up good. There's only about a hundred men holding the town, and it looks like the Germans will try to take it back tomorrow."

"Seems to me like you're going in the wrong direction," Mulholland said. "If they're so hard up for help, why are you heading away?"

"We only had two radios and they're both shot to hell. I volunteered to drive out and try to get us some reinforcements."

"We could hear that Jeep coming for miles. You're quite a target," Mulholland said. "You'd be better off on foot, or even on a bicycle."

"No time for that," the soldier said. His foot toyed with the clutch and the Jeep lurched forward, rolled back. "We need to hold that town when the Jerries show up in the morning. It's one of the key points along that road into Carentan. I think we took them by surprise, but if we give up that town we'll lose twice as many men getting it back."

"Right up this road?" Mulholland asked. "It looks like we're headed that way. Might as well see if we can help out."

"Shoot a Jerry for me," the driver said, and let his foot off the clutch. The Jeep shot forward and careened down the road between the tall hedges.

Lieutenant Mulholland turned to look at his squad. His command now consisted of two snipers (or maybe one and a half considering Vaccaro probably couldn't hit a target smaller than a barn), a French girl, a captured German boy and an English paratrooper so gung ho that the lieutenant suspected the Tommy had maybe landed on his head coming down. Somewhere along the line they had become a seriously motley unit. All they needed now was for a stray dog to tag along.

"Jesus," he said out loud to no one in particular. He didn't normally use the lord's name lightly but that was par for the course since coming ashore at Omaha Beach; he was beginning to question what sort of person he had become over the last few days. Nobody had prepared him for this at OCS.

The little group stood in the road, waiting for him to tell them what to do. Getting antsy, Vaccaro shifted his rifle to his other hand and spoke up, “Lieutenant?”

At times like this, the lieutenant sometimes thought of his grandfather, who had served with General Grant during the Civil War. He recalled a family story about his grandfather saving the famous general from a Confederate sharpshooter. Had Brendan Mulholland ever felt this overwhelmed? It had been a different time and a different enemy, but the lieutenant took strength from the fact that he wasn’t the first Mulholland to fight a war. His grandfather hadn’t let General Grant down, and Mulholland wasn’t about to give up on his ragtag squad.

"You heard the man,” Mulholland said. “Let's go rescue us a town."

* * *

The town of Bienville was a deceptively quaint and sleepy French village. With its old stone houses, shops with brightly painted signs and doors, church steeple, and narrow cobblestoned streets, the village was the sort of place a traveler on the road to Carentan might have used up a frame or two on a precious roll of film to capture.

Indeed, the town thrived mainly on commerce because it was surrounded by wet, boggy marshes that did not make good crop or grazing land. To make matters worse, the Germans had flooded the marshes to ensnare paratroopers. The flooded fields and marshes around Bienville now held the drowned bodies of scores of American paratroopers.

The flooding also had created a bottleneck so that anyone bound for the key Norman city of Carentan had to stay on the road through Bienville. Skirting the town through the flooded fields surrounding it would be impossible. Beyond the marshes were the hedgerows to contend with. Essentially, the Germans had managed to make the village into a key strategic point. Nobody was getting anywhere by road in Normandy unless they came through Bienville.

And yet the Germans had lost the village in a short, sharp battle the day before. The invasion at the beaches had caused such confusion that the German High Command in Normandy had overlooked the defense of the town. The small force in the village had been taken by surprise when a unit of Americans suddenly came up the road and raced into town.

The German defenders fled or were killed; a Wehrmacht doctor and several medics had stayed behind to care for the wounded on both sides, turning the church into a makeshift hospital. There was no hope yet of transporting the wounded back to the beach head for more advanced medical care.

No stranger to conflict, the village had grown up around the church founded in the eleventh century. Other troops had marched through; other battles had been fought nearby. Though this was a French village, the combatants were now Germans and Americans, and the weapons were rifles and machine guns rather than spears and broadswords, longbows and crossbows.

The old stone walls were pockmarked by bullets. In the narrow streets between the buildings, the smell of cordite mingled with the scent of fresh-baked bread.

The American defenders had set up a machine gun nest overlooking the main road into town, which the snipers approached cautiously.

"Hold your fire!" Mulholland shouted, then waved. Somebody waved back, and they approached the town.

"Don't tell me you're the freakin' cavalry," one of the machine gunners said. "We're gonna need a few more guns to hold off the Germans if they send Panzers at us."

"Hey, buddy, we can turn around and leave if you don't want us," Vaccaro said.

"Don't get sore," the machine gunner said. "We'll take what we can get. We've only got about eighty men to defend this place. How many do you think the Germans are going to send at us in the morning?"

"More than eighty," Vaccaro said.

"Yeah, it's like Custer's Last Stand all over again," the machine gunner said. "Lucky for us the Jerries don't take scalps."

The snipers moved into the village itself. Everywhere they looked, the American troops were scrambling to set up defensive positions, using wooden carts, even mattresses and tables to create firing positions at the street corners. Some were busy rigging so-called “sticky bombs” to use against the Panzers that would surely be there by morning. A few soldiers occupied second or third floor windows, getting ready with grenade launchers. The thick stone walls made each house a fortress in its own right.

Mulholland reported to the captain in charge, who agreed that the snipers should be placed wherever Mulholland thought best.

"All right, listen up, here's our plan," Lieutenant Mulholland said. "Neville, I want you to position yourself and your Tommy gun in one of the upstairs windows near the edge of the town. That will add some firepower to what's already covering the road into the village. The Germans will likely be coming out of the south, so Vaccaro, you get yourself up on one of the rooftops. The higher up, the better, because you'll have a longer field of fire. You start trying to pick off Germans as soon as they come into sight. Cole and I will go up into the church tower, which is the highest point in the village."

"What about me?" Jolie asked.

"There's a hospital set up in the church," he said. "Maybe you and Fritz can help."

They made their way over to the church, which was by far the largest structure in the village. The massive stonework and squat architecture gave the church a brooding appearance, and the square gray tower at one end of the church resembled a castle keep more than a steeple.

The church doors were open, and they started inside, but were stopped by a young man wearing a red and white medic armband. His uniform was spattered with blood. "No guns in the church," he said. "This is neutral territory, sir."

"All right," Mulholland said. "I can't argue with that. It is a church, after all."

"Thank you, sir."

They left their weapons behind and the young medic led them inside. After the bright light of the French countryside, it took a while for their eyes to adjust to the dark interior, lit only by the sunlight through the tall, narrow windows that were little more than slits in the deep stone walls. The air was cool, and smelled of rubbing alcohol and unwashed bodies. The pews were being used as hospital beds, and in many places blood had soaked into the ancient wood. It soon became apparent that Germans and Americans were among the wounded. Mulholland looked around, and saw that several of the other medics — marked by their white arm bands with medical crosses — were Germans.

"You've got Jerries in here?"

"Yes, sir. Our own boys and Jerries, along with a couple of French civilians who got caught in the crossfire. I guess technically the Germans are prisoners of war, but we've called a truce to help the wounded. You know, I was their prisoner at first because my parachute came down almost in the middle of the town, when the Germans still had control of it. They treated me all right. One of these Germans is a doctor, and he really knows what he's doing. There would be a lot more dead without him."

"Word has it that the Germans might try to take back this town in the morning," Mulholland said. He nodded at the massive double doors that opened toward the steps leading into the church tower. "Defensive positions are being set up outside. I want to set up a sniping post in the church steeple."

"Sir, you're an officer, so I suppose I can't tell you what to do, but the fact is that if you start shooting from that steeple, the Jerries are going to hit back, maybe with mortars, maybe with Tiger tanks. They'll turn this place into rubble. With all due respect, sir, is that really what you want with all these wounded men in here?"

Mulholland took a moment to look around the interior of the church. Fritz moved among the wounded, speaking with them in German. The German doctor heard him, waved him over, and set him to work helping bandage a leg. Jolie kneeled beside a girl, no more than eight or nine, who lay wounded on one of the church pews.

"I suppose you're right," Mulholland said. "I'll leave the woman and the German with you. That's two extra pairs of hands."

"Thank you, sir."

Mulholland turned to Cole. "OK, there's a lot of hours between now and dawn. Get something to eat, get some sleep, and then we'll get into position before sunrise. Obviously, the church steeple is now off limits, so we'll have to find ourselves a roof top."

"I reckon there's plenty of roof tops," Cole said. He smiled. "Plenty of Jerries to shoot, too, once that sun comes up."

* * *

Jolie waited until dark, then stole a bicycle and peddled toward the chateau that now served as Wehrmacht headquarters. At first, she tried to be stealthy, but that seemed ridiculous to attempt on a bicycle when every rut and pot hole sent the machine rattling like a bucket of bolts.

It was hard to tell if she was riding through territory held by the Germans or by the Americans — at night, with trigger happy and exhausted soldiers everywhere, running into troops from either side would be equally dangerous.

If anyone stopped her, she planned to pose as a French girl on a desperate errand — a sick relative perhaps. The Americans might stop her, but the Germans would be more wary. With luck, any German sentries she came across wouldn’t shoot her.

Fortunately, the small lanes she kept to were deserted except for the occasional owl, fox or rabbit.

Jolie knew these roads well. She had grown up in Normandy, of course, but it was her role in the French Resistance that had truly taught her the best routes to travel the bocage by night, undiscovered.

The Allied invasion had been long awaited by Jolie and the other French maquis. She recalled the grim days of June 1940 when the Germans had arrived. She had watched in disbelief as the truckloads of German troops drove in with their square steel helmets and harsh, guttural orders. German was truly a soldier’s language.

Many French had accepted the Germans with a grudging shrug. For the most part, the Germans were easy to get along with — unless you happened to be a Jew. All of the Jews in Normandy were quickly rounded up, never to be seen again.

There were some French, like Jolie, who would not give up so easily — at least not in their hearts. This became the French Resistance and she had quickly joined. There had been nighttime raids on supply trains and radio centers. Small groups of soldiers traveling at night might not reach their destination.

But the Germans made the French pay dearly for these acts of rebellion and the maquis soon limited operations to gathering intelligence for the Allied invasion to come. They bided their time.

Jolie’s first real lover was a young Resistance fighter named Charles. He was tall and had dark, Gallic good looks. He took terrible chances on missions, yet he was shy in bed. She still recalled the feel of his skin against hers — there was no better feeling in the world.

He was captured one night while counting gun batteries at the beach. The Germans shot him in the courtyard of the very chateau she was riding toward tonight.

Jolie had gone with some women of the village to collect the body. She never cried for Charles. They both knew what they were doing was dangerous, and Charles had paid the ultimate price.

Thinking about Charles, Jolie peddled harder, until her heart raced. She was beyond tears for her handsome lover, dead at the hands of the German occupiers. What Jolie craved now was revenge.

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