Chapter 21: Retribution

"We gotta do something about them damn Germans," the captain said at one of our rare winter meetings. He passed the jug and asked for suggestions. We drank his whisky and waited for him to tell us what he had decided. "Ought to make it like a surprise if we can," he said. "Catch 'em sleeping."

"They do put out guards, pickets," somebody said. The captain made a face at him.

"Get rid a'them first," he said, "quietly."

"What brought this on?" I asked.

"More rapes, more farms burned down, more folks just slaughtered, butchered," the captain said, taking back his jug. "And they ain't taking prisoners neither."

"They holding any folks?" I asked.

"Part of the problem," he said. "We know one bunch, they got a mother and two daughters at the last place they hit. We don't know if they're still alive."

"Maybe we ought to go see a'fore we go in stabbing everything that moves," I suggested.

Pretty soon everybody was looking at me, and the captain said he appreciated me volunteering and hoped I'd be back in a day or two so we could do the job and then move on to something else.

I did not recall volunteering, but that night I found myself some twelve miles east, in the woods in sight of the orderly camp of this small jaeger company that had been raising hell, about thirty men we believed. I spent some time looking at the tents, one after the other, until I found one with a guard standing in front and some men coming and going pretty regularly.

I had already spotted the outpost guards, and I waited until just after they changed, around sunset, to make my move. I tossed a big stone over the nearest soldier's head, and when he looked where it landed, I stepped in behind him, yanked his chin up and cut his throat. Still using Magda's knife, I slit open the back of the tent where I hoped to find the women. I had guessed wrong, it was the officer's place with a table and lamp and two men who looked very surprised when I stuck my head inside. After that it got a little noisy as I ran back into the woods and climbed a tree, happy my horse and heavy weapons were a mile or so away at a friend's cabin.

The Germans milled about, sent out two-man search teams, yelled and carried on for an hour or so and then settled back to nervous watching. I still did not know which tent held the captives, if any, but I got lucky and found them with some help. A nearby guard stepped behind the tree where I was hiding to relive himself, and I swung down behind him while he was shaking it. I held his head to the tree, showed him my big bayonet, and urged him to be still. He understood, his eyes wide, never leaving that big blade pointing at his nose.

"Fraus, frauleins, where fraus?" I asked it my broken German. My vocabulary actually ended with the word for beer, which was Bier.

No, no, he told me. "Nein," he said. "Frau tot, Madchen vent, gone."

I figured out, after a bit more prodding that the girls had been taken somewhere and that their mother was dead.

"Where Madchen, where are the girls?" I demanded, poking him here and there.

He tried various words and pointed, I suspect astounded how thick I was.

"Farm?" I asked. "Farm house over there?" I pointed where he had and he nodded vigorously and smiled.

"Zwei," he said, holding up two fingers.

I thanked him and then hit him in the side of the head a couple of times with the handle of my heavy bayonet in my fist. He folded up, and I cut his throat, kicked some leaves and sticks over him and went looking for the farm house.

I heard it before I saw it. Men were singing, roaring might be more like it at a cabin in a barely cleared field. The stumps were still in the ground and the farmer had plowed around them the previous spring. I hated to do nothing, but there were obviously a number of men in and around the place so I waited until things quieted down and the windows got dark. By then four or five, all officers it seemed, had stumbled back toward the tent lines leaving a sentry and two dark windows.

I waited another hour to see if anyone would be coming back and then circled the small house. The guard was a large young man, and I had to stick him twice with my bayonet before he stopped struggling after I knocked him down with a tree limb. I kicked in the door after finding it securely locked and found two young women in the room's only bed. Light from the banked fire showed them huddled together, bare tailed in torn shifts, frightened and disheveled. I think they had been crying.

"Come," I said, "Hurry. Where are your clothes?"

"Gone," said one, "they took them all, burned them, laughing."

I found another quilt on a chair, and they wrapped themselves up, found their shoes and followed me, stepping over the dead soldier without a sound. We trooped single file through the woods to my old friend's cabin and my patient horse. I was tempted to wait until daybreak, but decided to get some more miles between us and the Hessians, so boosted them both to the saddle and led the horse down the trail, trotting and then walking and then trotting again until I figured we had covered about five miles. I was puffing when I stopped, helped them down and offered my canteen.

"What happened?" I asked the older girl, barely visible in the starlight, she looked to be seventeen, eighteen or so and she had a nasty-looking black eye.