Hanging on

your father told you about it?" Beame asked, his voice thick and barely recognizable.
        Before Nathalie could reply, her father replied for her. "I most certainly have told her about America," he said, stalking like a brontosaurus out of the trees and into the small clearing. He threw an exaggerated shadow in the campfire light. "And I have also told her to avoid all soldiers no matter if they are German, American, or French."
        Nathalie came quickly to her feet. "Father, you must not think-"
        "I will think what I wish," Maurice said, scowling at them.
        He no longer looked like a fat, greasy old man. The strength born of years of hard labor was evident in the powerful shoulders and in the hard lines of his face. He looked capable of tearing Beame into tiny, bloody pieces.
        "We were only talking," the lieutenant said, also rising.
        "Why did you not ask my permission?"
        "To talk?" Beame asked. He glanced at Nathalie. She was staring at the ground, biting her lip. "Look, Mr. Jobert, it was just a nice little dinner-"
        Maurice advanced another step, cutting the lieutenant short with one wave of his right hand. The campfire illuminated the lower half of his face but left his eyes and forehead mostly in shadows, giving him a demonic appearance. "Just a nice little dinner? What of the wine?"
        Beame looked guiltily at the bottle which rested against a tree trunk. "The wine-"
        "I provided the wine, father," Nathalie said.
        "That makes it much worse," Maurice said. "Alone at night, drinking with a soldier-at your own instigation!"
        "He's not like other soldiers," she said, a bit of fire in her now. "He is a very nice-"
        "All soldiers are alike," Maurice insisted. "American, British, French, German, whatever. They have one thing in mind. One thing only. Now, girl, you come with me. We're returning to the village."
        Beame was helpless. He watched as Maurice led the girl out of the woods, out of sight, out of the lieutenant's life. "I didn't even touch her," he told the darkness where Maurice had been.
        The darkness did not respond.
        "I wish I had touched her," Beame said.
        The roof had been taken off the main bunker at the south end of the clearing, and preparations made for erecting one of the fake buildings over this ready-made basement. As a result, the men who had been sleeping there were dispossessed. And for the first time since the unit had been dropped at the bridge, the tents had been broken out and set up. They were lined in a haphazard way, the rows wandering, intersecting randomly-more the work of a troop of inept first-year boy scouts than that of a trained Army group.
        Major Kelly walked briskly along one of the tent aisles, followed by twenty men. He had personally chosen each of his escorts, and he had made certain that they all had four things in common: each was big and muscular; each was mean; each was rowdy; and each one had signed his credit contract.
        They stopped before a tent which looked like all the others that stretched away in the darkness, and Kelly used a flashlight to consult the chart he had prepared before sundown. "This is Armento's tent," he told the men with him. Armento had been one of the nineteen bastards who had not signed their credit contracts. Smiling grimly, Kelly leaned down, pulled back the flap, and shouted, "Up and out of there, Private Armento!"
        Armento had worked hard all day on the preparations for the construction of the village, and he was sleeping sound as a stone when Kelly called him. Shocked by this intrusion into his deserved rest, he nearly knocked the tent down when he scrambled out of it. "What? What? What?" he asked Kelly and the men behind Kelly. He rubbed his eyes. "What?"
        "Sorry," Kelly said. "Emergency. Got to requisition your tent."
        And he was sorry to have to use pressure tactics on Armento and the other holdouts who had not signed their confessions. He felt like a monster, an insensitive creep, another General Blade. But he had no choice. The Panzers were coming. Death was coming. There was nothing else to do.
        Five of the men behind the major, all bigger than Armento, knocked down the tent and rolled it up. Before Armento could ask any questions, Kelly led his husky escorts down the aisle to the next victim.
        By now, everyone was out of his tent. Most of the men were