“What happens if you don't fire your weapon?”
When the German soldier fell at his feet, he couldn't move, was certain he wasn't breathing. Then Callish was in his face, pale as a ghost, shaking him.
“You saved my life! He would have killed me!”
Staring down at the German soldier, somewhere near his own age, probably with a family waiting for him at home, he was struck by the tragedy of it all. He didn't feel like a hero.
“Someone has to tell what happens here...”
He didn't take a picture then. Instead he turned his camera on the family still huddled in the corner of the bombed-out house— the woman, three children, no father.
“American,” a soldier said, showing the arm patch of the American flag, as he pushed around them and began to question the woman.
“You, there,” he motioned to Callish. “You speak French? Come here.”
Paul Bennett walked out of what was left of the house.
They went street by street, the sound of machine gun fire in quick bursts, silent, then more rounds with a brief response of enemy fire. It was a different sound from Allied weapons that they'd come to recognize. Then another burst of Allied gunfire. Then there was no return of gunfire.
The city was in ruins. What the mortar bombardment hadn't destroyed, the fires finished off, smoke billowing from shattered buildings, the bodies of those who had stayed glimpsed through what was left of a wall.
At the edge of the city explosions rocked the docks and the quay out in the harbor, as those Germans who had stayed behind in a last effort to hold the city, destroyed what was left. Then there were the stories from the survivors in the city, mostly women and children. Over the past weeks, the Germans had rounded up all the men and boys, ages sixteen to sixty. They'd been imprisoned on a small island. All had been executed before the Allies reached the city.
He stumbled, caught his footing, and realized that he stumbled over a body. It was a child, a young girl, seven, maybe eight years old. A few feet away was a cloth doll, dropped when she fell. He raised his camera and took the poignant shot, so that people would remember. Then he picked up the doll and tucked it under the girl's hand.
He fought that first instinct to scream at the soldiers around him. Didn't they see what was happening? Innocent people were dead!
“As soon as we secure the city, we're to turn north,” a Canadian soldier said, his expression grim.
“Come along, mate.”
They all understood. It was in their expressions as they glanced down at the girl, and at him as they passed by. They were all caught in it, one man's madness had brought them all to this.
Click, click, click.
He didn't see the German soldier until afterward, only the movement out the corner of his eye, then that distinctive sound of the German gun. He didn't even feel the pain. There was just the sudden warmth in his shoulder, and he was firing his rifle.
“Bloody Christ!” Callish shouted when it was over. “You've been hit!”
Then the pain set in, fire burning in his shoulder. This was how it happened. It all came down to one last shot against overwhelming odds, one last attempt to hold the line, push back, then die. Someone he'd never met. On any other day in any other place they might have sat down for a pint.
The medic dropped his kit to the ground.
“The bullet went through,” he told him, pressing a thick pad of bandage against the wound and tying it off.
“You'll live.”
Then the medic gathered his kit and rushed ahead with the advancing Allied soldiers. There were more wounded to tend to.
Callish helped him to his feet. He pushed him away. It took some effort, and the pain was a constant reminder, but he eventually shouldered his rifle on the opposite shoulder, then picked up his camera.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
PRESENT DAY
It was late as the tour bus reached St. Malo, lights along the stone parapets of the walled city gleaming through the misty rain.
