It fit with what they'd heard earlier, their goal to take St. Malo, badly needed by Allied forces, and now German determination to prevent that.
“Any word from Micheleine?” he asked, knowing that it was unlikely as they moved south from Mont St. Michel.
Nico shook his head. “She will go north to meet up with others. My work here is finished. The Americans have the information they need.” He angled his head toward the resistance fighter who had returned with him, a shadow who slipped into their encampment the night before, and had provided the information they needed about the city.
“You will take my picture, yes?” Nico said with a grin, the boy peeking out from the usually somber expression.
Paul reached for his camera. He'd taken pictures of all of them before, and those candid shots when Nico wasn't aware, a serious expression, those dark eyes, the frown. But he wanted these pictures to remind him of the boy he'd glimpsed. He took several shots.
“You will keep them?” Nico said suddenly serious.
“Yes.”
The boy nodded. “We didn't have pictures.” He didn't need to explain what he meant—pictures of home, his family.
“There was never enough money, and then the Germans...” He was thoughtful.
“With no pictures, it's as if they never existed. Do you understand?”
Paul gave him the only answer he had. “They exist as long as you remember them,” he told him, and wondered what would happen to him, what would happen to all of them.
“I must go,” Nico said, suddenly standing. He adjusted the rifle on his shoulder, the boy disappearing once more behind that too-old expression.
“Where will you go next?”
“Where I am needed.”
“When you see her...” Paul began, but wasn't certain what the message was.Be carefulseemed ridiculous. An address where he could write her? Equally ridiculous. When this was over...
“I will tell her that you are well.”
Paul nodded.
“We will meet again,” Nico said, in that way that people always say things, hoping that it is true.
Paul stood and stuck out his hand. “Bon chance, my young friend.”
Nico shook his hand, then tipped his cap in parting and disappeared through the circle of soldiers at the edge of the encampment.
The fight for St. Malo was fierce, and too many times it was uncertain. It was part of the German defense and fortification system from the bay of St. Michel to the mouth of the Fremur river. Names of places, hundreds of years old, were now the center of German resistance, their last hope to hold onto the coast of France.
The city center was surrounded by thick stone walls that had been built to withstand medieval siege by other foreign armies. Reinforced by the German army, it was almost impregnable.
Day by day, seemingly inch by inch, the Allies tried to penetrate those walls, find some opening to the city. A delivery driver attempted to enter the city. They were told he carried food and medicine, but it was rumored he also carried weapons. The truck disappeared inside the gates.
Paul’s photographs revealed their frustration in the expressions of soldiers' faces, the American commander as he stared in frustration at the walled fortress through binoculars, and positions that changed daily, sometimes hourly. Then on the third day, determined to take the city and keep the schedule that had been laid out by the Allies, the American commander ordered the shelling of St. Malo.
It was rumored that he sent the Resistance back to tell the people of St. Malo to leave, if at all possible, but there was no certainty that they were able to get to them in time, or that there was even enough time to leave when the shelling finally began at dawn the following day.
It went on for hours, round after round of mortars pummeling the walls and the eighteenth-century buildings of the city beyond. The clouds of smoke were now from the Allied bombardment. When the mortars fell silent, Allied soldiersswarmed through breaks in those medieval walls, and Paul Bennett was witnessing a new and horrific history through the lens of his camera.
“So that others may know,” Micheleine had told him, if any of them lived through it.
And then he was pushing into the city with the rest of the Allied forces, moving street by street, house by house through smoldering ruins. He kept moving, kept shooting pictures, his rifle in the crook of his arm, into the next house, the ceiling sagging from damaged timbers, a family huddled in the corner of the kitchen.
Click, click. Then a shout, gunfire, and blood splattered the lens as he shouldered his rifle.
“How will you know what to do?” Callish had asked him over a cold meal two days before.
