By Paul Leone
Into The Jaws of Death. Troops of Company A, 16th Infantry, 1st Division (US) disembarking onto the Fox Green section of Omaha beach, 6th June 1944. The company suffered 65% casualties (25% killed, 40% wounded) that day. The price of freedom.
Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons, taken by Chief Petty Officer Robert Sargent.
This is the nearest Saturday to the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and the words Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha, and Utah became forever written in the pages of history, written in the blood of young men.
To mark this, we have this piece by Paul Leone.
*****
WEATHER REPORT
LONDON
JUNE 1944
The tea kettle had just started boiling when the car arrived at Barchester House. Elise Cooper wasn’t surprised, but she was a touch annoyed. She removed the kettle from the stove and emptied it into the sink, and only then did she see to her unexpected guest.
The visitor was a tall man in a slightly worn suit who introduced himself as Parker. He showed her his card, which, aside from his name, was familiar to her in every detail.
“I’ve been asked to – to ask you if you’d come visit a mutual acquaintance, ma’am,” Parker said.
Elise eyed him for a moment, then nodded. More to the tall, pale-skinned and fair-haired young woman lurking nearby than to Parker himself. The other woman, a temporary lodger at Barchester House, noisily withdrew, growling a little as she did.
Parker raised an eyebrow at that but had been well-trained enough not to comment.
A few minutes later, Elise was in the back of the car as it wound through the streets of the capital. Here and there, far too often, she could see the remains of the last spasm of the Furor Teutonicus.
She’d only spent a relatively small part of her life in London, but it was enough to spot familiar places, buildings she knew, bombed to rubble. It wasn’t the buildings that made her grip the walking stick at her side, though, but the faces she associated with them. Gone, almost all of them, many even before the war. The bombing had taken more of them away.
The Club was still standing, though, not far from the St. James end of Pall Mall. It wasn’t a club any more, though, at least going by the sign next to the door. Now it was the property of the Ministry of Food’s Pest Control Office.
“Mm,” Elise said as she let Parker open the door. She stepped out and looked around, walking stick tucked under one arm. This part of London hadn’t been immune to Teutonic fury. Scaffolding was thick here and there, steel bandages on bomb-battered buildings.
“This way, ma’am,” Parker said once they were inside. He had to sign in, but she waved away the book and pen when held out to her, and Parker didn’t raise a fuss, just an eyebrow. He had been quite well-trained, Elise noted.
Parker led her through the now-unfamiliar maze of narrow hallways and newly built walls. The place was as busy as a beehive just now.
Something made Elise quicken her pace, and she took the last few turns without guidance from Parker, who again decided not to comment.
The head of the Pest Control Office, or whatever it was really called by the people who mattered, was waiting in a small, respectably furnished room that had once been a large and luxurious one. He sat in a plush chair, one big enough to almost swallow him up. A once stout body was rail thin now. The eyes, keen and grey, hadn’t changed.
He gestured for Elise to take a seat opposite him, which she did. The two of them looked at each other in silence for a moment.
“You think I look ghastly.”
“You look tired, sir,” Elise said.
“Sir, still?”
“It seems fitting still.”
“I suppose it is and I suppose I am. Tired. The inevitable reward of service. I’ve been busy as never before these last few years. But it’s almost over, I think. For me, at least. The next war I trust to other hands.”
Elise didn’t want to think about the next war. The current one was horrible enough. “You’ve earned a respite.”
The man smiled wistfully. “Almost. But there’s still a bit of business to be taken care of before that.”
“You know I can’t help,” Elise said. That had been the topic of their last conversation, held in this very room in the autumn the war began. It hadn’t been a pleasant conversation and it had ended in bitter shouting – both of them shouting in a way that usually breaks friendships. They had never quite been friends, but whatever they had been, it was over now.
“I’m not asking you to help. Not as before.” The man took out a pipe and stared at it for a moment, then replaced it in his pocket. “But there is something.”
“H’m?” Elise asked, her expression carefully neutral despite the sudden hammering of her heart. She’d dreamt of this for months. Nothing magical there. Most of England – most of Europe – had to have been dreaming the same thing.
“I have a colleague who works not far from here.” The man paused and took a few steadying breaths. Elise could feel the strain on his heart that was slowly killing him. “He has the intention of watering his neighbor’s lawn soon, but only if the weather’s going to be right. The forecast isn’t as clear as he would like. Which is why he came to me and why I’ve called you to me.”
Elise sat back, hands folded on her lip, waited for him to go on. It would help if he asked.
“Might you – could you, that is, offer your advice? It would be useful.”
Elise sat there in silence for a moment. The grandfather clock nearby ticked rather loudly (as it had been set to do so at the man’s instructions). Then she nodded. She shut her eyes for a moment and what she wanted to know came to mind. At last she spoke, eyes still shut. “The weather will be tolerable for watering the lawn, sir. Not splendid, but tolerable.”
“Good. Very good. Just what I had hoped to hear.” The man sighed and leaned back. “Thank you,” he said.
Elise, eyes open, rose to her feet. “I wish I could help with the watering. I truly do.”
The man looked at her. “I imagine you do,” he said, then took the pipe out again and stared at it. “As it happens, so do I. But it’s not our lot in life, is it? I think I understand what you said the last time we spoke.” He smiled, a ghastly expression that signalled exhaustion more than mirth.
“And I... I wish your friend and his men the very best of luck,” Elise quietly said. She curtsied slightly and then took her leave without another word.
Upon leaving the Club, Elise stood for a moment, leaning on her stick and looking away beyond the bounds of the city, beyond England’s shores, away across the water. She heard, as it were, the thrum of engines on high, and the sound of ships cleaving the waves, and the beating of a hundred thousand hearts or more.
Dear God, hold them in your hand, she thought as she got into the waiting car.
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