Iron Sniper: A World War II Thriller

Epilogue

Major Dorfmann sat at his desk, a glass of French cognac at his elbow. Sadly, France was lost. Happily, Dorfmann had managed to get out with several cases of very good cognac.

The cognac was for more than consumption; in a way, it was currency. He remembered the bad time after the Great War, when money itself had become worthless. A wheelbarrow full of paper money was needed to buy a loaf of bread. He suspected that those times were coming again. When that happened, the small bottles of cognac would be like gold for trading. Until then, he could afford to drink some of it and hope for better days. Besides, he needed a bit of alcoholic inspiration to generate his latest propaganda piece.

He sighed and sipped his cognac, enjoying the bite of it on his tongue, along with the faint taste of grapes and earth and sunshine mixed in with the heat of the alcohol. Better days, indeed.

Production of Luftpost by his SS Skorpion unit had been temporarily suspended in the confusion of the retreat from France, but he was proud of the fact that production had continued as soon as he returned to Germany and secured the use of a printing press. The Nazi war machine had run out of Luftwaffe airplanes, but it was not likely to run out of newsprint and printer's ink anytime soon. Airplanes would be welcome, but the weekly newspaper was almost as useful as powerful inspiration for the common soldier.

The newspaper that had permanently ceased production was Lightning News: Condensed News for Service Men. This was the paper he produced in English to be read by the Allies. Had his propaganda articles about girls back home in America being stolen by negroes and Jews made the GIs fight any less hard by undermining their confidence and doubting their government? Dorfmann liked to think so; there was real value in such fake news to undermine the democratic will. Without his Lightning News, France might have been lost sooner, or fewer Wehrmacht troops might have escaped the Falaise-Argentan debacle.

Much of Germany's army had been destroyed or captured in the final, awful battle at Falaise. What was left of German forces had fled across the Rhine, hoping for a miraculous last stand. Fortunately for Dorfmann, he was as far as possible from the front — while also being a safe distance from Berlin.

It wouldn't be long there before there were recriminations and state-mandated suicides. Dorfmann wasn't planning to fall on his sword, like that unfortunate Von Kluge. No, he would make every effort to avoid Berlin, and every excuse not to return if ordered there. Besides, with the Russians coming at them from the East, Dorfmann wanted to make sure he surrendered to the Allies if and when the time came.

Meanwhile, the war was far from over. But with the Allies pressing in from the west, and the Russians threatening the east, Nazi Germany was more like a caged, cornered wolf than a beast on the hunt.

No matter how much cognac he drank, Dorfmann never would have expressed such sentiments to anyone. The Gestapo would have him strung up on a meat hook.

In point of fact, it was his job to instill hope on the homefront and inspire the troops in the field. Not an easy job these days.

He took another sip of cognac and smacked his lips.

What he needed was a good story for Luftpost. He needed a hero.

Dorfmann searched his mind.

He kept coming back to the young sniper, Dieter Rohde. He seemed to have been killed in the fighting at the Falaise Pocket. He had not much liked Rohde, who seemed impertinent and more interested in personal glory than Germany’s. No matter. It would not take a great deal of fiction to cast him as a hero.

A dead hero was the best sort in that he couldn't turn out to be a disappointment later.

Unfortunately, Rohde's immediate commander, Hauptmann Fischer, had also been lost in the battle. There had been a real soldier.

In the sort of rousing prose meant to inspire the troops, Dorfmann described Rohde's heroic last stand, holding off Allied troops so that the last of the wounded could be carried to safety across the ford at Gue de Moissy. He inserted an entirely fictitious report that the American General Patton had demanded to know how one German sniper could stop the advance.

Satisfied, Dorfmann pulled the typewritten page from his typewriter, made a few corrections in pencil, and passed it along to his typesetter.

In several large boxes that he always carried with him, Dorfmann kept various props to be used in staged photographs. He went to a box now and rummaged about until he found what he was looking for, which was an Iron Cross.

The photo shoot cost him two bottles of his precious cognac. He was in a hurry, and he had found that the carrot worked so much better than the stick.

He secured a white cross that would be used to mark a grave, and had a clerk pound it into the yard out back. Dorfmann himself pushed the tacks into the wood, so that he could affix the Iron Cross to the grave marker. Technically, the Iron Cross was worn over the left blouse pocket of the uniform tunic — over the heart — but a couple of tacks would work for what Dorfmann had in mind. Then he assembled six soldiers to stand at attention to one side of the grave, marked by the cross. They made a passable honor guard. Dorfmann himself took the photographs and processed them. He already had a headshot of Rohde, which he would include. The young soldier had been a handsome devil.

He was pleased with the story and photographs; in a single afternoon he had concocted his lead story. After a moment's thought, he sent the article and copies of the photographs along to Vólkischer Beobachter, the official publication of the Nazi party, distributed nationwide. The editors there would be glad to feature it prominently. It was likely that even The Leader himself would read the story.

Rohde had gotten his Iron Cross, after all. Dorfmann did not bother to submit the paperwork, which was not likely to make it through the increasingly chaotic channels, anyway. No matter. Rohde and his Iron Cross were going to be front-page news, which was as real as anything could be.

Dorfmann added a bit of cognac to his glass, and feeling pleasantly intoxicated now, raised the glass as if making a toast. "Prost," he muttered, then drank.

Germany had another dead hero.

Rohde would have been happy, die kleine Scheisse.

Like an island in a storm, Lisette's farmstead had ridden out the battle mostly unscathed. She and the children returned three days after Cole had rushed them to safety. With other refugees from the fighting, she had taken shelter in a refugee camp behind the lines but close enough to hear the artillery.

She had prayed that there would be a home to return to.

Some of the old people seemed content to remain in American custody, but Lisette felt too much like a herded sheep. The Americans were trying to keep the refugees corralled almost like prisoners because they feared that members of the Wehrmacht — or worse yet, the SS — would try to escape by posing as refugees.

However, Lisette and the children did not attract much attention from the American MPs, so she had managed to slip away, starting out on foot with the children.

She had picked up a few more words of English in the last few days and managed to communicate to the driver of an American supply truck that she needed a ride.

At first, he had been reluctant.

"I don't know if it's a good idea, miss," the soldier said.

If she had not understood all of the words, she had understood his tone.

"Please," she said, putting a note of desperation in her voice.

The young soldier finally nodded. "If you really want to go, I'll take you."

She and the children had climbed into the back of the truck.

On the day that General Eisenhower was inspecting the ruins of nearby Argentan and viewing the Corridor of Death, Lisette returned to the farm.

Lisette had no desire to see where the heart of the fighting had taken place. There were enough corpses along the roadsides as it was, most of them German. The Allies had done what they could to quickly retrieve and bury their own dead in the summer heat. Eventually, the German dead would get burial in a mass grave.

The children seemed fascinated at first by the bodies, but then grew bored with the sight. They were more worried about how their old dog had fared.

Lisette did not have the heart to tell them that the dog had likely perished. How could he possibly have survived?

When the farm came into sight, Lisette slapped the tailgate and the driver let her out.

The truck slowly pulled away, and Lisette inspected the damage. Pockmarks showed where a spray of bullets had struck the front of the farm cottage. There was a charred hole in the thatched roof of the barn. She could see the churned earth where shells had struck. Miraculously, the farm had survived the battle relatively unscathed.

With pounding heart, she walked around the corner into the farmyard, fully expecting to see Rohde's body and those of the other soldiers.

The bodies had disappeared, likely thanks to one of the burial crews. She gave thanks for that much.

Rohde. How could one ever forget what he had done to her or to Leo? She thought of him less now as her lover than as her defiler, a monster that she had harbored her bed. One could not forget something like that, she decided, but neither did one always have to remember. She decided to bury his memory in the darkest root cellar of her mind.

While she stood there taking it all in, their dog appeared from around the corner of the cottage. Leo and Sophie wrapped their arms around him gleefully.

"You must be starving, poor thing." She gave him some of the crackers that she had gotten from the Americans. He wolfed them down. Some of her chickens had also survived, so at least they would have a few fresh eggs.

Over the next couple of days, Lisette worked to put things in order as best she could. The larger projects, like the hole in the barn roof, would have to await Henri's return.

To her surprise, he came limping into the farm a week later. He had been wounded in the leg and spent a few days in an Allied hospital, but the wound had not been severe. Many of the French Resistance fighters had volunteered to join the Allied forces taking the fight to Germany itself. With the Germans gone from their own countryside, Henri announced that he'd had enough of fighting. Henri put on his coveralls, and became a farmer once more, with Sophie and Leo tagging along beside him. Their old neighbors gave him something of a hero's welcome for fighting the Germans, and pitched in to help him make repairs.

It was a few days after that the American sniper, Cole, appeared.

"I just wanted to check up on you," he announced.

Henri's English was passable enough, and he translated. He seemed suspicious of the American at first, remembering the incident at the forward command post when Cole had pulled a knife on him, but instantly became more welcoming when Lisette explained that it had been Cole who took her and the children to safety just as the battle began. Henri greeted him warmly, and even gave the American a glass of red wine.

"You and your sister gettin' on all right?" Cole asked.

Henri grinned wryly and turned to Lisette. "He wants to know if I am still beating you."

Lisette reddened. The American was asking about Henri's reaction to the fact that Lisette had had a German soldier as a lover. Neither she nor Henri had made any mention of Rohde since her brother’s return. It was a subject that neither wished to discuss.

Henri straightened his shoulders and announced, "Lisette has done more for France than I have. She saved the farm and she saved my children. She is the true hero." He repeated the words in French for Lisette's benefit.

Cole finished his wine and stood. He had a graceful way of moving, an economy of motion, that made Lisette uneasy. He was no farmer. Cole looked so strange and out of place in their kitchen. The dull gleam of his rifle and the telescopic sight seemed somehow sinister. He smelled of sweat and gun oil. She realized that this man made her uncomfortable because he reminded her too much of her old lover, Rohde.

It was with a sense of relief that she watched him cross the farmyard and disappear into the fields. She tried to watch him out of sight, but an odd thing happened — the sniper Cole seemed to vanish into the landscape. One moment he had been there, and the next moment, he seemed to have disappeared.

Lisette shuddered and turned back into the kitchen. A stew bubbled on the stove. Henri sat with both children in his lap. For the first time, Lisette felt that for her, and for France itself, the war was finally over.