A minute passed. Slowly.
Down by the river, frogs were singing.
Another minute passed. Slower than the first.
“Come on, Tooley,” Beame whispered. They were somewhat exposed on the steps, good targets for a Wehrmacht sharpshooter.
Kelly rapped on the door again. Even before he finished the tune, the portal scraped open a fraction of an inch, like the entrance to a crypt controlled by demonic forces.
“It's me, Tooley. Major Kelly.”
“Whew!” the pacifist said. “I thought it was a German.” He stepped out of the way, let them in. He was invisible in that lightless chamber.
When the door was closed again, Tooley switched on a flashlight, confident that none of its glow would escape the subterranean room. Liverwright, holding his wounded hip, loomed out of the darkness. And so did Maurice.
“What are you doing here?” Major Kelly asked.
“Dying,” Liverwright said.
“Not you,” Kelly said. “Maurice, you're supposed to stay away from here. You told me you didn't dare show your face around General Rotenhausen.”
Maurice nodded. “And I pray I will not have to.” His face glistened in the flashlight's glow.
“We have big trouble, sir,” Private Tooley said.
“Then you know about Slade?”
“Bigger trouble than that.” The pacifist sounded as if he were on the brink of tears. “Blood's going to be spilled.”
“Bigger trouble than Slade running around loose?” Kelley asked. He felt as if he might vomit.
Maurice moved forward, commanding attention with his hefty stomach and his low, tense voice. “Two hours ago, one of my contacts came from the west to tell me that an Allied tank division has broken through the German lines and is rolling rapidly your way. I have checked it out myself. The Allies are driving hard to capture this bridge of yours.”
“Ah…” Major Kelly said. He wished that he had been born without his legs. If he had been a cripple since birth, he would never have been drafted. He would be at home right now, back in the States, reading pulp magazines and listening to radio and having his mother wheel him to the movies. How nice. Why hadn't he ever before realized the wonderful life a cripple could have?
“Allied tanks?” Lieutenant Beame asked. “But this is no trouble! Don't you see? Our own people are on the way. We're saved!”
Maurice looked at Kelly. “There's another good reason for him to stay away from my daughter. I won't have her marry a stupid man.”
“What do you mean?” Beame asked, baffled. “Aren't we saved?”
“I'm afraid not,” Maurice said.
“Well, when are the Allied tanks getting here?” Beame asked.
“They ought to arrive before the Panzers start across the bridge from this side,” Maurice said. He looked knowingly at Kelly. “By dawn or shortly thereafter, Major.”
“Even better!” Beame said. “I don't understand why you're unhappy.”
Major Kelly sighed and rubbed his eyes with one fist. Maybe if he had been born with only one hand he could have avoided this mess. He would not have had to be really seriously crippled to stay out of the Army. “Think about it for a minute, Beame. In a couple of hours, you're going to have Allied tanks on the west bank of the river— and German tanks on the east bank. The Allies will control the land over there, and the Germans will control St. Ignatius. Neither the Allies nor the Germans are going to permit the enemy to cross that bridge.”
“Stalemate!” Beame said, smiling at Maurice, Tooley, Liverwright, then at Kelly, gradually losing the smile as he went from one face to the next. “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God, there's going to be a tank battle for the bridge!”
“Sure,” Kelly said. “They'll sit on opposite shores and shoot at each other. And we'll be right in the middle.”
Beame looked as if he were going to be sick on his own shoes.
“Don't be sick on your own shoes,” Kelly said. “I couldn't stand that right now.”
“Look,” Beame said, “we don't have to wait around for this battle. We can slip away into the woods until it's over.”
“Two hundred of us?” Kelly and Maurice exchanged a grim smile. “Even with darkness on our side, we've had trouble moving around town. That was just two of us. With two hundred — no chance.”
Despite the changes which had taken place in him recently, Beame was much the same as he had always been: naive, full of hope. “Well… what if we sent someone west to meet these Allied tanks before they got here? If we told them that the Panzers were here, maybe we could persuade them to let the Germans cross and hold the battle elsewhere.”
“This they will not do,” Maurice said. “For one thing, the Allied tank commander would know that the Germans will blow up the bridge after themselves. They almost always do these days. And the Allies wouldn't want to lose the bridge.”
“We can build them another bridge in a day!” Beame said.
Tooley nodded eagerly. “That's true.”
“You forget that only Blade knows we're here,” Kelly said. “The commander of those Allied tanks doesn't suspect there's a unit of engineers and laborers stranded behind the lines. Although, I suppose we could tell them… ”
Maurice shook his head sadly. “No good, mon ami. If it were any other Allied commander at the head of this force, he would help you. But this general will not even pause to listen to what you have to say. He's too caught up in the success of his one-unit campaign.” The greasy, sweaty old man looked at each of them and delivered the final blow. “The Allied tanks coming this way are commanded by General Bobo Remlock.”
“We're all dead,” Kelly said.
“Well,” Beame said, “I guess we are.”
General Bobo Remlock was a Texan who called himself The Fighting General. He also called himself Latter-Day Sam Houston, Big Ball of Barbed Wire, Old Blood and Guts, and Last of the Two-Fisted Cowboys. They had all heard about Bobo Remlock when they were stationed in Britain prior to D-Day. The British and Americans who had served under Remlock could never get done complaining about him. Remlock encouraged his men to call him Big Tex and Old Blood-and-Guts, though not to his face. What he did not know was that everyone called him That Maniac and Blood Beast and Old Shit for Brains behind his back. If Bobo Remlock were leading the approaching force, he would not stop for anything. He would roll up to the other side of the gorge and utterly destroy St. Ignatius in the process of liberating it.
“We do have one chance,” Maurice said.
“We do?” Beame asked, brightening.
“No, we don't,” Major Kelly said.
Maurice smiled. He put his two pudgy hands together, pressed them flat and tight, then threw them open as he whispered: “Boom!”
Kelly decided that Maurice had lost his mind, just like all the men in the unit had done.
“With the machines hidden in the convent,” The Frog said, “you also have many sticks of dynamite. Many yards of wire. A plunger and battery. If we waste no more time, we might be able to plant the explosives under the bridge. In the morning, if the expected showdown between Generals Remlock and Rotenhausen comes, we will quite simply demolish the bridge. Neither commander will be able to take his tanks down a gorge as steep as this one. And because there will be nothing left to fight for once the bridge is gone, both the Allies and the Germans will have to seek elsewhere for a river crossing.”