“All soldiers are alike,” Maurice insisted. “American, British, French, German, whatever. They have one thing in mind. One thing only. Now, girl, you come with me. We're returning to the village.”
Beame was helpless. He watched as Maurice led the girl out of the woods, out of sight, out of the lieutenant's life. “I didn't even touch her,” he told the darkness where Maurice had been.
The darkness did not respond.
“I wish I had touched her,” Beame said.
The roof had been taken off the main bunker at the south end of the clearing, and preparations made for erecting one of the fake buildings over this ready-made basement. As a result, the men who had been sleeping there were dispossessed. And for the first time since the unit had been dropped at the bridge, the tents had been broken out and set up. They were lined in a haphazard way, the rows wandering, intersecting randomly — more the work of a troop of inept first-year boy scouts than that of a trained Army group.
Major Kelly walked briskly along one of the tent aisles, followed by twenty men. He had personally chosen each of his escorts, and he had made certain that they all had four things in common: each was big and muscular; each was mean; each was rowdy; and each one had signed his credit contract.
They stopped before a tent which looked like all the others that stretched away in the darkness, and Kelly used a flashlight to consult the chart he had prepared before sundown. “This is Armento's tent,” he told the men with him. Armento had been one of the nineteen bastards who had not signed their credit contracts. Smiling grimly, Kelly leaned down, pulled back the flap, and shouted, “Up and out of there, Private Armento!”
Armento had worked hard all day on the preparations for the construction of the village, and he was sleeping sound as a stone when Kelly called him. Shocked by this intrusion into his deserved rest, he nearly knocked the tent down when he scrambled out of it. “What? What? What?” he asked Kelly and the men behind Kelly. He rubbed his eyes. “What?”
“Sorry,” Kelly said. “Emergency. Got to requisition your tent.”
And he was sorry to have to use pressure tactics on Armento and the other holdouts who had not signed their confessions. He felt like a monster, an insensitive creep, another General Blade. But he had no choice. The Panzers were coming. Death was coming. There was nothing else to do.
Five of the men behind the major, all bigger than Armento, knocked down the tent and rolled it up. Before Armento could ask any questions, Kelly led his husky escorts down the aisle to the next victim.
By now, everyone was out of his tent. Most of the men were grinning, because they knew what was up. Only nineteen of them were bewildered…
Kelly was directing the tearing down of the eighth tent, embarrassedly parrying all questions, when Lieutenant Slade arrived. Slade was furious. “You are harassing the men who stood with me, the men who wouldn't sign those insane credit contacts.” Slade shook a finger in Kelly's face.
“Not at all,” Kelly said, feeling like a heel. “The hospital staff says we're short of bandage materials. If we suffer another Stuka attack, the shortage could be a matter of life and death. So we're confiscating a few of the tents to cut them into strip bandages.” He felt ill, and he hated himself.
“Canvas bandages? Ridiculous! If you're not harassing these men who stood with me,” Slade said, “why are you demolishing only their tents?”
“Are we?” Kelly feigned surprise. He consulted his chart. “Why, we just picked the names out of a hat.” Into which, of course, they had only put the names of the men who had not signed their contracts.
Lieutenant Slade followed them, ranting impotently as the tents came down. As they were folding up the eighteenth square of canvas, he planted himself in front of Kelly. “You aren't going to rip down my tent. You won't bully me into signing away my good name!”
“I'm not bullying anyone,” Kelly said, wishing it were true. “Besides, your name wasn't drawn from the hat. We aren't confiscating your tent. You will be snug and warm and dry tonight.” Kelly looked at the sky, pointed at the thick gray thunderhead clouds rushing westward. “Sure does look like rain before morning.” He was conscious of all the other men looking skyward with him. “These other fellows whose names were drawn at random from a hat will have to put up with a soaking, I'm afraid. But we couldn't make it any fairer… ” Any unfairer. Kelly sighed. “We have to remember there's a war going on, and that some of us must make sacrifices. At least we don't have to put everyone out in the rain, eh? You needn't worry, Lieutenant.”
Slade saw the full implications of what the major had said. He grimaced. “Very cunning, sir. But you are not going to divide and conquer us. We aren't going to put our lives and futures in the hands of a man like Maurice, no matter what you do to us.”
“I admire your strong character,” Kelly said.
Ten minutes later, the eighteen tents had been stacked in a corner of the hospital bunker. They made quite a mound.
Lily Kain put her arm around Kelly's waist and detained him at the bunker door as he was leaving. “You really think it will work?”
“Work?” Kelly asked. “Never. Oh, this and a few other things I have planned might get them to sign their credit contracts. But that won't mean very much in the end. We're all going to die. We just have to go through this charade now to keep the fairy tale moving. You know?”
“Don't start with that fairy tale shit,” Lily said.
“Can't help it. Puts things in perspective. Keeps me alive.”
A can opener of lightning took the lid off the night, and thunder rumbled like an escaping vacuum. Rain bounced on the steps, spattered on their faces, ran into the hospital bunker behind them.
Kelly smiled, happy that the men were now almost certain to sign their contracts. Then he frowned, depressed by the realization that he had been forced into becoming a somewhat ruthless manipulator of people.
Well… anything to hang on.
5 / JULY 19
Shortly after dawn, two men came to see Major Kelly in his quarters. They were both wet, shivering, pale, water-wrinkled, and defeated even though the rain had stopped falling half an hour ago. Kelly was slipping into clean, dry fatigues when they rapped on his blanket wall. “Help you fellows?” he asked, peering around a woolen corner. He smiled warmly.
Two minutes later, only seventeen men had refused to sign the credit contracts.
It's working! Kelly thought, when they had gone. But then he remembered that the Panzers would arrive in little more than four and a half days. Right now, he should be engaged in the serious planning which was essential to the early stages of the construction of the fake village. The bridge was up, the preliminary work done, and now he ought to be plunging into the main project. Instead, be was wasting time and energy trying to trick the holdouts into signing their damned confessions. If he was achieving his lesser goal, he was also losing the chance to attain the greater one. He might eventually get every man to sign his contract — but by then he would have wasted so much time that they could never build the village before the Germans arrived…
Nevertheless, he was the first in line for breakfast at the mess hall, because he wanted to have a front row seat for the morning's carefully planned drama. “Looks delicious,” Kelly told Sergeant Tuttle when the cook ladled hot cereal into his mess tin.