Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Six

December 13, 1944. Lepont, Belgium. Wednesday, 1400 Hours.

In the gloom of an afternoon laced with snow, a boy named Alain ran along the cobblestone streets that twisted through the village of Lepont, a cluster of old stone houses on the banks of the River Salm.

The boy was fourteen but dwarflike in appearance; five years of wartime privation had checked his growth and pinched his features and the lack of fats in his diet had given him the lusterless skin and hair of an old man. As he hurried through the square, past the Church of the Holy Spirit, the clatter of his wooden shoes was almost lost in the sweep of wind off the river. At the edge of the town, where the village merged with the fields, he stopped at a house and knocked insistently on the schoolteacher’s door.

When Denise Francoeur opened it Alain gave her the message from his brother, Jocko. She nodded and turned quickly to collect her heavy cloak from a hall tree. The young woman and the boy then hurried toward the village square to Jacques Berthier’s café. Wind coming across the Salm filled her cloak like a sail and she almost lost her balance on the slick stones. She was breathing raggedly, hating the sick, familiar fear she had lived with for so many years. When the German garrison had pulled out of Lepont three months earlier her fears had gradually retreated with them, but now the terrors were alive again.

Denise Francoeur would be twenty-five on her next birthday. Four years before, her husband, Etienne, along with most of the young and able-bodied men of Lepont, had been sent off to slave labor camps in Germany. She had not heard from him in twenty-six months. The last letter had come from East Prussia...

Jocko Berthier waited for them in the shadows of the church. He was short and thick, with stocky legs, but with a back so crippled that his body was bent almost parallel to the ground and his neck was perpetually cramped from looking up to meet the eyes of everyone but the children of the village.

When his brother and the schoolteacher came into the square. Jocko led them to his cafe, where the name — La Chance — was spelled out in cracked gilt letters on veined glass windows shrouded with blackout curtains.

The café was bitterly cold and the only illumination came from a squat candle on a table near the window. Five or six women of the village huddled near the cold stove, pinched, worn faces framed in rough shawls, and they began talking noisily when Denise Francoeur and the Berthiers entered, accusing voices directed at two people who stood apart from them, an old man and a child with a red scarf covering most of her face.

Jocko silenced them with a gesture of his crippled arm, but it was Denise Francoeur who calmed them with a teacher’s skill. “Please go home and take care of your own families. Forget that you’ve been here. Don’t talk about it, not even to Father Juneau. That way you won’t be involved. If anyone asks, you can honestly say you don’t know anything. Do you understand that?”

“We’re sick of it all. We’ve had enough martyrs, Denise,” a woman named Madame Homais said.

“Then go home,” the schoolteacher said.

When Madame Homais turned to the door, she was followed in a rush by the others, and soon they were all sweeping off like dusty bats down the dark streets and Denise Francoeur was saying to Alain, “Take Margret to my home now.”

When the children had left. Jocko went to the bar and poured a glass of schnapps for the old man.

“Some of those old witches are cousins of mine,” Claude Girard said, after downing the drink and smacking his lips. “Such Flemish dung.”

“Why did you bring Margret here?” Jocko said.

The old man’s story was confused and wandering, his estimates of time and dates blurred by his fears, but Jocko and the teacher listened to him quietly and patiently because they knew the same fears themselves.

Some farmers, Claude Girard told them, and people working in the woods east and north of Verviers, had seen German trucks and German soldiers. The rumors had spread through the villages. German soldiers were thick as the trees in the Ardennes, hidden by heavy fog.

“But did you see any of them?” Jocko said.

“No, but I heard people talking.”

“Are you a crazy old bastard running from shadows and rumors?”

“They aren’t shadows.” Claude Girard pounded the bar with his hand. “I know about these things. I was at the Marne when the soldiers came to the trenches in taxicabs.”

“To hell with the merde Marne and the merde taxicabs,” Jocko said. “You listened to rumors and you took the girl and brought her here. Is that all it is?”

“No, there was more.”

Some farmers had seen German soldiers with SS insignia, Gerard told them. They saw this, Claude Girard said, and wet his fingertip and drew the outline of a shield in the dust on top of Jocko’s bar. Licking his finger again, the old man carefully drew three vertical lines inside the shield.

“And they saw that,” he said.

The emblem he had drawn so crudely meant nothing to Denise. She glanced at Jocko, who studied it without expression and dismissed it with a shrug.

“I was frightened, I didn’t wait, I took Margret away with me,” the old man said. “We followed the river staying on old paths. I had brandy with me and we found potatoes and turnips on the way. On the second day, when it was almost dark, we met Americans, four soldiers. They asked me about Germans. I gave them vegetables. They gave me a hundred francs and chocolate for Margret.”

“Where did you meet the Americans?” Jocko said.

“Twenty or thirty kilometers from Werpen. I brought her here because I didn’t know where else to take her... If you’ve got a place I can sleep, I’ll go back to Verviers in the morning. Without the girl, I’m just an old farmer walking in his fields.”

Jocko told him there was an extra bed in Alain’s room, and when the old man shuffled through a door to the rear of the house. Jocko looked at the teacher and said, “A drink?”

“No, I’ll go home.” But she changed her mind. “Yes. Do you think they’re coming back?”

“Yes, they’ll be back.”

“Why are you so sure? You treated Claude like a foolish old woman.”

“Because I didn’t want him babbling like a foolish old woman. Look.” He pointed to the shield Claude Girard had drawn on the bar. “You see what it is? The crusader’s shield of Das Reich.”

“Oradour,” she said.

“And if Das Reich is on the line...”Jocko’s voice was suddenly weary. The others would be there with them, he told her, the Leibstandarte, the Totenkopf, the Horst Wessel...

Jocko poured two drinks and the moving candlelight sent the shadows of his crippled arms leaping across the walls and ceiling.

“Still, Denise, Coutreau told me that he and his son have seen only Americans between St. Vith and Malmédy for weeks.”

She crossed herself and said, “Will you come by and fix a place for Margret?”

“Yes, I can do that.” He sipped his drink and looked at her. “You’re the only one in the village who cares to remember me as I used to be.”

“It will end. Jocko,” Denise said, touching his hand and placing her empty glass down firmly on Das Reich’s crusader shield.

She drew the heavy cloak about her shoulders and went out. A faint sound was rising on the air, the rush of night winds circling the church steeple in the square of the village.