Gods & Snipers: A World War II Thriller

Chapter Twenty

Over the centuries, French farmers had learned a thing or two about surviving marauding armies that stripped their farms bare. It didn't matter whether the soldiers were German, French, or even American — a hungry soldier meant disaster all the same to a peasant.

It wasn't uncommon for the French farmers to hide some of their potatoes and dried corn in deep holes, for example, to be dug out after the soldiers had passed, leaving just enough stored in their barns and root cellars so that the passing troops would be satisfied.

The farmers had learned that it paid to set a few pigs loose as well. Foraging on acorns or on wormy windfall apples in abandoned orchards, the pigs grew fat without any effort from the farmers and far from the reaches of passing troops. It was easy enough to hunt up a pig in the woods when one needed meat. Over the years, some of the hogs had grown half-wild and developed long hair and even tusks.

Moving through the misty, fog-shrouded hills surrounding the Moselle, a patrol from General Unterbrink's unit had the good fortune to come across a group of these feral hogs. The shy hogs scattered, but not before one of the soldiers got off a shot. They carried their prize back to camp with them, the pig slung upside down from a stick balanced on the shoulders of two of the men. The sight of the men carrying their prize into camp was as ancient as time itself.

Luckily, the soldier had the good sense to shoot one of the smaller, more tender pigs — one that weighed no more than fifty pounds. Good eating.

"Where's Hauer?" one of the men called, setting down his burden with a grunt near the campfire built to keep off the chill. "Didn't he used to be a butcher?"

"Roast pork tonight, eh? I'll see if I can find him."

The Germans had not always been soldiers, and some of their skills from civilian life were useful from time to time. Such was the case with Hauer, who really had been a butcher. In no time at all, with help from the other soldiers, he had the pig strung up by one of its hind legs.

"You have to bleed it," he explained, and with one swipe of his knife, he cut a gash in the throat of the pig. The animal had not been dead long, and blood gushed out to soak the ground. Instead of a Wehrmacht-issued blade, Hauer carried a simple sheath knife with a wooden handle. The knife was well-used with a blade worn thin and smooth from much sharpening. It was a tradesman's knife rather than a soldier's, but wickedly sharp.

He wiped the blade and returned it to the sheath, then considered what to do next. Normally, a butcher dipped the carcass into scalding water and then scraped off the loosened hair. However, they didn't have a tub big enough or any way to heat the water quickly.

Ancient hunters hadn't had those items either, so Hauer settled on the more traditional method of burning the hair off. He made a torch by wrapping a strip of canvas around a branch and pouring kerosene over it. He recruited a couple of other men to help him scrape away the scorched hair. They wrinkled their noses at the disgusting smell of burning hair. The smell brought to mind images of blackened tanks and charred corpses. One man couldn't take the stink in his nostrils and passed off his knife to another.

"Not so bad," Hauer announced, inspecting their work so far. He brushed the torch across a few spots they had missed, leaving behind smooth pigskin.

Then Hauer had them wash down the carcass with clean water. He stood back to admire their work. The pig now looked naked as a newborn babe. He used an ax to cut off the head.

Next, the former butcher in him went to work. Taking his sharp knife, he slit the pig's belly from the anus to the throat and dumped the guts in a warm pile that steamed in the cool fall air. Done properly, there was no smell but that of the warm blood.

The communal butchering was something that the farm boys were used to, as well as the hunters among them, but others found the parting out of the pig disconcerting. The headless, pale-skinned carcass looked vaguely human. In twentieth-century German cities, not everyone was familiar with where their meat came from. Several men suddenly hurried off to other duties, real or imagined, or remembered equipment that needed maintaining.

Using the ax, Hauer chopped the ribs away from the backbone, working down one side at a time. It was hard going, though, and Hauer handed off the ax to another man and directed the chopping with blood-caked fingers. Once the last rib was cut away, he now had two sides of meat.

He saw no point in doing up cuts of meat for the display case or to hang to entice customers as he might have done in his old shop. Using the ax, he cut off a nice rack of ribs for General Unterbrink's cook. The rest of the pig went over their campfire.

"Make sure it cooks through," Hauer said, but that was the extent of his advice. He was a butcher by trade, not a chef. He left the cooking to a couple of older, heavyset men, who tended the cooking meat and the fire lovingly.

Even those who had been queasy at the sight of the butchering process couldn't ignore the delicious smell of roasting meat. By and large, the soldiers were well-fed with no shortage of rations. However, tinned ham did not compare to the juicy, fresh meat roasting on the spit before them. One by one, the men drifted back to the fire and admired the sizzling and popping of the fat.

For a little while, as they joked around the fire and passed a bottle, it was almost possible to forget the war. Tomorrow, they might very well be dead. Who knew or cared? They had taught themselves not to think too far into the future. Today, at least, they were still alive, they were still German soldiers, and they were going to eat very well indeed.

Like the others, Hauer looked on approvingly as the meat sizzled and dripped into the fire. He turned to the soldiers who had brought in the pig. "Tomorrow, let's go back into the woods and see if we can find another," he said.