“The bridge piers?”
“Nearside pier is down. I couldn't even locate the struts through the anchorage and down to the pile. All gone. Farside pier's okay, bridge cap in place and the bearings sound. In fact, the farside cantilever arm isn't even bent. The suspended span is gone, of course, but we still have a third of the bridge up.”
“Too bad,” Major Kelly said.
“Sir?”
It was Major Kelly's duty, as directed by General Blade, to see that this bridge, which spanned a small river and a larger gorge for some nine hundred feet, be kept open. The bridge was presently behind German lines, despite the great advances the Allies had made since Normandy. No one had yet seen any Germans around here, except those in the Stuka dive bombers which had knocked out the damned bridge three times after Kelly's men had rebuilt it. The first time, in its initial existence, the bridge had been destroyed by the British. Now that Allied armored units hoped to cross the gorge at this point, whenever the German Panzer divisions had been turned back and finally overwhelmed, it must be maintained. At least, General Blade thought it must. This was one of his private contingency plans, a pet project. Kelly thought that General Blade had lost his mind, perhaps because of chronic syphilis, and that they were all going to die before any Allied armored units could ever use the bridge. Though Kelly believed these things with a deep and abiding pessimism, he also believed in getting along with his superiors, in not taking chances, in hanging on. Though they were all going to die, there was a slim chance he would last out the war and go home and never have to look at a bridge again. Because this slender thread of hope was there, Major Kelly didn't tell the general what he feared.
Beame, wiping at the grime on his face, still waiting for some sort of explanation, coughed.
“What I meant,” Kelly said, “was that I wished they'd taken out the entire bridge.”
“Sir?”
“Beame, what is your civilian profession?”
“Civil engineer, sir.”
“Beame, if you had no bridge to keep rebuilding here, more than two hundred miles behind German lines, if no one bombed this bridge so that you could repair it, what the hell would you do with yourself?”
Beame scratched bis nose, looked around at the clearing, the encircling trees, the smoking gorge. “I don't know, sir. What would I do?”
“You'd go mad,” Major Kelly said. He looked at the sky, which was very blue; and he looked at the cantilevered bridge, which was very demolished. He said, “Thank Christ for Stukas.”
3
Lieutenant Richard Slade, darker and chubbier than Lieutenant Beame and looking somewhat like a choirboy with a vicious streak, was called The Snot by everyone in the unit except Sergeant Coombs. Slade did not know this, and he would have been enraged if he had heard the nickname. He was a young man with an overdeveloped sense of pride. Now, he came trotting out from HQ to tell Kelly that General Blade was going to call through in fifteen minutes. “The General's aide just placed the alert call in code,” Slade said.
Kelly tried to keep his torn trousers out of sight. “That's not supposed to be until tonight.” He dreaded talking to the general.
“Nevertheless, he'll be on in… about twelve minutes now. I suggest you be there, sir.” He pushed his thick, brown hair back from his forehead and surveyed the bridge below. “I imagine we'll be requiring supplies again.”
“I imagine so,” Kelly said. He wanted to punch Slade in the mouth. Even when Lieutenant Slade used the correct form of address, he imbued the obligatory “sir” with a sarcasm that infuriated the major.
Slade said, “Sir, you'd better make a supplies list before he calls, so you can read it quickly — and so you won't forget anything.”
Major Kelly gritted his teeth so hard he almost broke his jawbone. “I know how to handle this, Lieutenant Slade.”
“I was only making a helpful suggestion.” The lieutenant sounded hurt, though Kelly knew he wasn't. You couldn't hurt Slade, because Slade had a huge, rubber ego that bounced your insults right back at you, quick as a wink.
“Dismissed,” Kelly said, though he knew he wasn't a good enough disciplinarian to make the word mean anything. He was tall, lean, well muscled, and hard-looking. He had very black eyebrows and what he fancied was a piercing gaze, and he should have been able to keep a man like Slade in line. But he couldn't. Probably, that was because Slade realized how terror-stricken he was. Being terror-stricken made him less like an officer and more like an enlisted man.
“Will the Major entertain another suggestion?” Slade asked.
Why the hell did he have to talk that way? Entertain, for Christ's sake! Entertain!
“What is it, Lieutenant?” Kelly attempted to be abrupt, icy, and harsh. That wasn't one of his better roles, however, and Slade seemed to think he was only being stupid.
“We rebuilt the bridge after the British bombed it, and the Stukas showed up to destroy it again,” Slade said. He was one for repeating what everyone already knew, as if the fact gained some deep clarity that only his voice could impart to it. “When the Stukas went, we built the bridge a second time. The second flight of Stukas came and knocked the bridge down again. Yesterday, we completed repair of the bridge, and now the third flight of Stukas wiped it out.” He looked at Kelly and Beame, waiting for some reaction. He seemed unaware of the fumes that rose from the gorge, and he was the only man present who was dressed in immaculate fatigues.
“So?” Kelly said at last, realizing they would remain there through the night and the following day and even beyond that if he did not prod the lieutenant.
“I believe we have an informer in our midst.”
Kelly looked incredulous, but not too incredulous, since Slade just might be right. “Who do you suspect, Slade?”
“Maurice,” the lieutenant said, triumphant, grinning, The Snot.
Maurice was the mayor of the only nearby French village, a hamlet of four hundred souls, so small it hadn't been on any of their maps when they were first dropped here behind German lines, following the successful landing at Normandy. For the most part, the townspeople were farmers and laborers; Maurice owned the only grocery and the hardware store, a third of the town's businesses which lined the single main street. Maurice was perhaps sixty years old, drank too much, bathed too little, and bragged that his eldest son was in Brittany working in the FFI—Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur—and had renamed his town Eisenhower once the Normandy invasion had acquainted him with that word.
Slade, seeing the disbelief in their faces, said, “I know that's an unpopular notion. I know how much everyone here likes Maurice and how much everyone thinks Maurice has done for us. But you'll remember that I have never fully trusted him, and you'll admit that he has the best opportunity to report to the Germans.”
“Surely there isn't a radio in Eisenhower,” Kelly said. “And he would need one to make reports… ”
“Perhaps it was dropped to them by a German night plane,” Slade said. He always had an answer, which was another reason why everyone hated him.
Kelly wiped the soot off his face, looked at the blackened palm of his hand, wiped his hand on the seat of his pants, and jumped when his fingers slid over his own bare ass. Embarrassed, he said, “I can't picture that.” He wondered if there were long black finger marks on his behind.
Slade wasn't done. “Why is it that the Stukas have never given our position to any element of the German army? Why haven't they sent ground troops after us, to wipe us out? Why is it that the Stukas bomb the bridge but not our positions? The machines, all our supplies, stand unharmed so we can rebuild the bridge again. Could it be the Krauts are playing some sort of game with us?”