When We Meet Again by Carla Kelly

Author:Carla Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: If you must fight a war, make it good one, so you can entertain admiring children and grandchildren years in the future. 
But what if your World War II stories are nothing more glamorous than an aircraft factory in boring Kansas, or a sugar beet farm in Southeast Wyoming? 
In “All My Love, ” readers find Women’s Army Corps Private Veronica Green stuck at a desk job with North American Aviation in Kansas City, Kansas. This wasn’t the war she wanted (the one the army recruiter promised), until she meets Master Sergeant Ernie Brown, a Military Policeman too soon reassigned to Belgium in time for the fierce Battle of the Bulge. 
But really, no one falls in love after one kiss. Surely she can forget him.
In “Yet I Will Love Him, ” war widow Audrey Allerton has returned home to her father’s sugar beet farm in Southeast Wyoming. It’s a good place to heal, far away from war.
To Audrey’s dismay, war is just down the road at a new POW camp. Equally awful, the camp is full of pilots who were part of Rommel’s storied Afrika Korps, the kind of monsters who shot down Ed’s plane.
To make matters worse, the prisoners have been assigned to area farms, her father’s among them, to provide desperately needed labor. She vows to stay far away from them.
Can she? Or will these hated men turn into real people? Case in point: Former Lufthansa pilot Gerd Gauss, an Austrian forced to join the Luftwaffe or be shot. He lost a wife and infant son during Allied night bombing over Hamburg. 
Gerd’s loss is no less tragic than hers. It’s a hard truth to realize that wars have two sides.
Publisher: Epicenter Press Inc.
Published: 2022-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

The PWs and their guard climbed into the truck bed. Dad was starting the truck when Walter Watkins waved him down.

“Mr. Nolan, I can take Mrs. Allerton to the courthouse. I’m going there.” He peered around Audrey’s father to see her. “If she doesn’t mind.”

“Not at all, Mr. Watkins,” she assured him, amused because he was too big of a priss to talk to her directly, even after working for him for six months. Hmm. Or maybe he was shy. Be kind, Audrey. “Thanks.”

She climbed out of the cab again, aware of eyes on her once more, but not minding it so much, for some reason, maybe because that one PW was so polite.

They rode in silence for a few minutes. Mr. Watkins navigated carefully through winter’s ruts. Sensing the conversational ball had dropped in her lap, she picked it up. “Mr. Watkins, I didn’t know you came here before work.”

He surprised her, even if he turned beet red in doing so. “I…I know you came back to Wyoming after your own loss. I didn’t want to trouble you with this part of my job.”

“That’s nice of you, sir. I’ll just have to get used to seeing the PWs around,” she replied, touched by his kindness. “Why do you have to go there?”

He allowed himself the luxury of a smile. “Mrs. Allerton, you’re obviously perspicacious enough to recognize just who runs that camp.”

She was right. “The Nazi head officer, I think. Who is he?”

“The highest-ranking German officer in this batch of prisoners. His name is Helmut Rheinhold, and he is a major. Same title in their army as ours. I think he is Luftwaffe, their air force.”

“You sound a little doubtful, Mr. Watkins.”

“I don’t understand his game.”

“Game?”

“Just a feeling. At least he commands the prisoners and they obey. I believe discipline is a national specialty,” he replied, as he pulled into his designated parking place, precisely between the lines, as she had noticed before. Mr. Watkins was a precise sort of fellow. “Still….I don’t know.”

“And Captain Gleason?”

Audrey heard his concern. “He isn’t well, and I worry about his… his…ability to be in charge, with a bully like Major Rheinhold around.”

She knew she was learning more than she had suspected, perhaps about the PW camp, or possibly about Mr. Watkins. She knew some of the courthouse secretaries called him Mr. Colorless. That might not be accurate. “I don’t believe you think that’s enough.”

He turned off the ignition. “I don’t.” He turned to face her. “You are observant, Mrs. Allerton.”

She could blush and deny, but why? “I am, sir.”

He sat back, silent in thought. She knew he did that in the office, too, and let him think. “Would you consider something, Mrs. Allerton?”

“Depending on…” she asked, wanting more.

“It’s this: I don’t trust our Major Rheinhold. I don’t think Captain Gleason can do his job.” He reddened again. “But who listens to me?”

“As in, they are incarcerated and who cares what happens to German prisoners?”

“Yes, Mrs. Allerton. Out of sight out of mind in God-help-us Wyoming, far away from either shore.

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