The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [31]
“Are you sure?”
“See the old patches of snow on one side of the tree? That would be north.” He zipped up the compass. “Look at the sun, goddamn it!”
Hadley relieved himself behind a tree. Marshall remembered something from escape-and-evasion class. Empty your bladder and bowels first. You’ll feel better and you’ll be prepared for the next crucial stages of your evasion. He said this to Hadley.
“That’s the only thing I remember from evasion class,” Hadley said. “And I figured tossing my cookies counted. What country do you think we’re in?”
AT SUNSET THEY MADE a shelter beneath the swooping boughs of an evergreen. They nibbled bits of chocolate and Horlicks malted-milk tablets from their escape kits. Hadley wore a heavier B-3 shearling jacket, much warmer than Marshall’s, and with no Bugs Bunny. They huddled together that night in a way Marshall had never expected to do with a man. He couldn’t abide Hadley’s fretting, his restless sleep punctuated with long sighs. The night was bitter, but the low-slung green boughs stopped the wind. Marshall could not identify the trees, but years later when he took his children to get a Christmas tree he decided they were some kind of spruce. Once, Loretta said innocently, “We’d better get spruced up,” and he cringed, remembering his long night in the Belgian woods.
They slept fitfully, and Marshall buried his face in Nurse Begley’s woolly-drawers, inhaling her sweet smell. He berated himself for paying so little attention in evasion class.
During the night, he thought about winter visits to his uncle’s house in the mountains, where he slept with a newspaper-wrapped hot brick. The windows were single-glazed, and the cracks around the windows and doors let in small zephyrs. He slept in a feather bed with some cousins, who sometimes tried to steal Marshall’s brick. There was often tussling over the covers and the bricks. “Stop your squirming,” his aunt would call from across the room. “You’ll let all the hot out.”
In the morning, the sunrise gave them their bearings. Hadley climbed a tree and reported a road leading to a village to the west. To the south was another road, with some farms set back beyond trees and fields.
“South,” Marshall said. “To Grandma’s house we go.”
Soon they emerged from the woods and saw the road, beyond a large field. Hadley insisted on traveling west, to search for a boat across the Channel, but Marshall argued that the only way back to England was south, through France and over the Pyrenees to Spain.
“But we’ll never make it, Marshall. I don’t care what they told us in evasion class. It’s too far, and it’ll be Germans all the way. If we go west and just hide out, sooner or later there’ll be a way to get across the Channel. Or if not, the invasion will be coming soon and we’ll be home free.”
“Germans are here too, Bob. Look.”
Ahead, a convoy of military vehicles was speeding down the clear, wide road. On a smaller, intersecting road, a man with a donkey and a cart plodded along. After studying the silk maps included in their escape kits, Marshall decided they had inadvertently crossed the border and were probably already in France. They continued south, but after an hour of arguing about the best route, they decided to split up. Marshall preferred being alone anyway, making his own decisions, and he was sure Hadley was wrong about the invasion. They parted on a ridge where they could see a clear juncture of west and south.
“Don’t lose your map,” Marshall said. “Put it in your coat lining.”
Thick, tall hedgerows separated the fields, and here and there farmers were at work. He tried to pick his way parallel to the main road, while keeping concealed, hiding in a ditch or among some trees when he heard vehicles approaching.
A truck convoy passed. He could see the German cross on the doors. He didn’t know if he was afraid. He knew he would have to find shelter this evening and each evening to come.
He walked at a fast