Of Another Time and Place by Brad Schaeffer

Author:Brad Schaeffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2018-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

38

The largest building other than the main house of LeClaire was the stone hall that must have been used in happier days for balls, recitals, and the like. It was a fifty-pace walk from the Kasino along a narrow pathway under a canopy of sycamore trees.

Now it served as the JG 32 base hospital. The dimly lit hall was lined with cots along each of the windowed walls, with a nurse’s station at the end on watch. Helena, our head nurse, whose braids, square frame, and chiseled features were lifted straight from a Wagner opera, sat with her face buried in paperwork. Most of the patients were sleeping. Some were pilots recovering from battle injuries. Many were wounded men from different wings who’d made emergency landings at the nearest airfield they could find, and ours, situated as it was between the French and German borders, was a common haven. One fellow was terribly burned when his plane cartwheeled and burst into flames upon landing, and he wasn’t expected to live. Others were in various stages of recovery. Many sported casts on their arms, legs, across their torsos. Most had either bailed out like me or tried to bring their wounded birds down intact only to end up bellying in.

I noticed that tonight the nurse was accompanied by an armed private, seated in a chair behind her barring the door. I eased up onto my elbows and scanned the room. My eyes quickly rested upon the reason for the soldier’s presence. Sitting up in a bed in the corner, staring at the ceiling, was a boy who seemed out of place here. His face was bruised, one eye was swollen shut, and his black-and-blue arm was in a crude sling. He still sported his hat, which was like our Luftwaffe visor cap, but it was muddy brown rather than blue-gray and crushed on the top. It too bore the golden emblem of an eagle, although it didn’t clutch the swastika in its talons but rather arrows in one and an olive branch in the other. On the chair next to him lay his signature leather jacket with the fur-lined collar and wrists.

So this is the enemy? I thought. I sat up in my cot and studied him.

He caught my eye, then turned his gaze to stare straight up at nothing. I was struck by how much like the rest of my pilots he looked. Sandy blond hair. Hazel eyes. A handsome lad despite his bruises and swollen face. He could have been any of my boyhood chums. This unsettled me. He was the first Ami I’d ever seen alive and up close. I was hoping for something, anything, that betrayed a sinister nature. One worth shooting out of the sky. But I saw just a boy like myself. And he was frightened, as I would be.

I wanted to ask him questions. How many planes do you have? What do you want with us? But then I felt the vice grip of nurse Helena’s beer hall hand on my good shoulder.

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