David Healey - Ardennes Sniper

A teenage girl came out of the church. She looked to be seventeen or eighteen, pretty in a country way with cornflower blue eyes and dark hair. She wore a simple kitchen apron, flecked with blood. The interior of the church had been converted to a makeshift hospital, staffed by a few medics and this local villager.

There had been a short, sharp fight as the Germans settled into La Gleize and the leading edge of the American force arrived. Inside the church, the pews were filled with wounded Germans, Americans, and townspeople. Someone had taken a white sheet and painted a red cross on it, then hung that from the church steeple.

“You should not be here,” Jolie called out to the girl in French. “Go home. There is going to be a battle here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” the girl replied. “This is my village. Some of my neighbors have been hurt. What about you? You are fighting alongside those men.”

Jolie shrugged and turned back to loading the rifle she had been given.

“What were you two jabberin’ about?” Cole asked.

“I just told her this was not going to be a good place for her. That she should go home.”

Cole snorted. “Well, if that ain’t the pot calling the kettle black.”

“That is just what she said to me.”

As the girl spoke, an old man approached her, smiling ear to ear, and brought her what appeared to be a bag of rags. Bandages. The girl took them gratefully.

“Look at her,” Vaccaro said. “She’s a regular Florence Nightingale, only cuter. Quick, somebody shoot me in the foot.”

“Oh, I reckon I might shoot you, but not in the foot.”

“Ha, ha. Hey, Cole, ever hear of a redneck virgin? That’s a girl who can outrun her brother.”

“Vaccaro, did you want me to shoot you now?”

“Wait a little and you might save yourself a bullet. It’s gonna get ugly around here any minute now.”

As a saboteur behind enemy lines, Klein’s tactic of falling in with an American unit had worked so well in destroying that fuel depot that he repeated it. However, it soon became apparent that this unit was not as disorganized as the one he had mixed with yesterday. He realized that most of these Amis knew one another, making Klein the odd man out. He had to slip away as soon as possible to avoid discovery.

The captain called a halt, and Klein welcomed a few minutes of rest. He put his rifle down against a tree and sat on a tree stump. He kept his head down and tried not to talk, but finally someone asked him a direct question.

“You look lost, buddy. What unit you with?”

“The two hundred and ninety-sixth engineers.”

“Yeah? You’re a long way from home, ain’t you?”

“ Ya . Everything is a mess,” he said. Klein could have kicked himself. Not yes or yeah or yep , but ya . He was that damn nervous and tired. He hurried to cover his mistake. “These damn Germans are causing a lot of trouble.”

“You got that right. I heard they blew up a fuel depot yesterday. Killed a couple of guys in the process. You know how the rumor mill goes — I hear there are Krauts dressed as Americans trying to cause all kinds of trouble.”

“If you see any, you let me know.”

“Ain’t you funny, buddy. You sound like you could be a German yourself. Are you from Pennsylvania? You know, Pennsylvania Dutch.”

“Philadelphia.” Klein didn’t know what Pennsylvania Dutch meant, but he knew Philadelphia was in Pennsylvania.

“I used to go into Philly to shop at the Macy’s,” the soldier said. “You know the big one near City Hall?”

“Macy’s. Of course.” Klein smiled tentatively. “I buy all my ties there.”

The soldier chatting with him came to a dead stop. He raised his M1 so that it was — almost — pointing at Klein.

“What the hell are you doing?” Klein stood. His hands crept toward the knife tucked into his belt, at the small of his back.

“Hey fellas,” the soldier said. “This guy here says he’s from Philly but he don’t know Wanamaker’s from Macy’s. You think he’s one of those German agents?”

The others stopped and circled Klein in a loose ring. They held their rifles so that they would be ready in an instant.

Klein said nervously, “You have the wrong guy.”

“Ask him what the capital of Pennsylvania is,” somebody said.

The soldier looked at him. “You heard the man. Well?”

“Philadelphia,” he said, grinning, as if the answer was obvious.

“No, buddy. Try Harrisburg.”

Somebody else fired another question at him. “Maybe he ain’t much on geography. How about the movies. So tell me, buddy, the name of the movie that won Best Picture last year?”

What? He had trained for hand-to-hand combat and for rigging explosives, not for trivia questions. He said the first title that came to mind. If it was that famous, it must have won the award. “Gone with the Wind,” he said.

But even as he said it, Klein knew from the look on the soldier’s face that the answer was wrong. His fingers searched for his knife. With luck, he might be able to cut his way free. His fingers groped frantically. Where was his knife?

“Looking for this?” a soldier asked, holding the knife in front of him. The American had been quicker than him.

Klein’s brain scrambled for just the right thing to say, but he was confused. German and English words vied for attention.

Too late. He saw that the first soldier’s rifle was now pointed directly at him. No amount of fast talking was going to get him out of this hot water.

“Hands up,” the soldier said. “It looks like we found us one of those back-stabbing Nazi saboteurs.”

Lieutenant Mulholland was called to a briefing before the attack on Kampfgruppe Friel. It was Mulholland who had enlightened the colonel that they were facing a column of SS troops.

“That figures,” said the colonel, whose name was Akers. “If they were Wehrmacht, they would have had the good sense to surrender. Now, we’ll have to kill every last one of the bastards.”

“There’s something else you should know, sir. These are the same bastards who murdered our men at the Malmedy crossroads,” Mulholland said. “Shot them down in cold blood.”

That caused a stir among the gathering of officers. The colonel finally waved them to silence with the stub of his unlit cigar. “All right, all right. If we’re going to be shooting fish in a barrel, the fish may as well be piranhas.”

The American attack would be head on. It would not be an assault so much as a bombardment. The Germans had their backs to the river with no way to cross, now that all the bridges had been blown. The American force surrounded them in a loose semi-circle, putting the lid on the pot.

For the Germans, the only choice would be surrender — or annihilation. Of course, the Germans were far from finished. Kampfgruppe Friel still had close to a thousand veteran SS troops and several dozen tanks, along with other artillery. Already, they were dug into the village, with panzers wedged between stone buildings and machine gunners burrowed down between thick stone walls.

When Mulholland asked for orders, the colonel waved his cigar again. He had a lot more to worry about than deploying a few snipers. He had absorbed the ragtag force that the snipers had joined on the road into his own unit, but he told Mulholland to deploy as he saw fit in support of the attack.

“You know more about it than I do, Lieutenant,” the commander said. “You just pick off as many of those SS bastards as you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

Returning to his men, Mulholland decided that a team approach would be best. That way, if there was a need to concentrate their fire, they could work together to do that.