We travel by night to avoid enemy fighters: bomb-laden American P-47's, rocket-toting English Typhoons. Death angels.
Twelve kilometers more.
I can nearly smell Marie Colette's perfume sweat, bad breath, and sex through the road-dust clogging my straight, Teutonic nose. The long barrel jutting out ahead of our Panther G, a 75mm KwK 42 L/70 cannon, reminds me off my cock the first time she came to me naked.
She had snuck away from her parents and bribed the sergeant on duty at the watch-post for directions to my bed. I remember turning when I heard the door to my room creak open. A foot slid through, then a narrow ankle, then the sublime curve of her leg.
Mon nom est Marie Colette.
Her first words as she stood before me, her dusky, Corsican skin glowing golden in the yellow light from the kerosene lamp on my desk. She wore a wool nightgown with buttons down the front and quickly undid the three holding the nightgown closed. My jaw dropped as the nightgown fell to the floor. She smiled, pleased, as my eyes devoured the curve of her neck, the taut globes of her Titten dangling from her chest, her soft hips, the curly tangle of brown hair above her sweet Fotze, beckoning for a man to become lost in.
My eyes jerk open. I realize that I have been slouching against the commander's cupola and straighten, rubbing my burning eyes. She is so close. I can almost see her waiting in the upstairs window of her farmhouse, brown eyes searching the darkness for us as we lumber down the road.
Himmel! I want her in my arms so badly. My crew would laugh if they saw the tears streaking the grime on my cheeks, especially Langer, the gunner.
Das Arschlock.
The asshole would guffaw in his braying mule voice and tell me that a whore's love is fool's gold. Then, perhaps, I would draw my sidearm and shoot him dead where he stands.
I am Henri Jaeger, Hauptmann, 22nd Panzer Regiment. My hair is brown, not blond, but my eyes are blue. Marie Colette noticed none of this that first time we were with each other. Instead, she laughed at the four toes on my left foot. That first winter on the eastern front claimed more than my patriotic spirit.
I try not to let her suspect that I am fond of her. I would be... politically difficult... if word were to get out that a Knight's Cross holder and veteran of two fronts was in love with a young French woman.
Bist du verruckt? I ask myself. Yes, I probably am crazy. To be mentally masturbating while we are still in danger! Some lost, enemy parachutist could be aiming an anti-tank weapon at us from someplace along the road ahead.
Our Panther G is the most dangerous of the armor-clad hunting cats. The Maybach V-12 behind me purrs deep in its pipes at the gibbous August moon rising from the eastern horizon. Seven hundred horsepower pushes all forty-five tons of us south from Feuguerolles-Bully toward our cantonment at Arnaye-Sur-Orne, following the pale, mute face shimmering in the L'Orne River to my left.
We are not invincible.
I sway in the commander's-cupola as our wide treads and try not to sleep. Jorgi-the driver-has almost driven us off the road twice already. Langer and our loader, Franz, are asleep in the turret below me.
"Easy, Jorgi," I say as I activate the radio-intercom. "Just keep us in the middle of the road. We're almost home."
#
Arnaye-Sur-Orne is small, perhaps five hundred people divided into families spread out in shingle or thatched-roof homes that encircle the town square. Our cantonment area is in the large glen at the southern edge of town. There is another Panther there and five Panzer IV's mounted with the same cannon as we carry, some Mercedes trucks, several half-tracks. Two companies of infantry secure the town.
Jorgi maneuvers into an open space beside the A-frame used to hoist out our Maybach engine when it needs repairs. Soft light glows from beneath the door of the small shack next to it. I hear movement below me when the engine noise goes quiet.
"Ach! Finally!" says Langer as the gunners-hatch beside me opens and he climbs though it onto the top of the turret. His back pops as he stretches, then he climbs down onto the fender, then jumps to the ground. "We've been away for too long, I tell you. We should have been recalled days ago." His eyes find me in the darkness. "You should complain to Major Kurtz."
"Someone must have shit in your brain and forgotten to stir it," I say as I disconnect myself from the wires of the radio-intercom, hang my headphones on the commander's machine gun and pull myself up through my clamshell hatch. "He's got enough to worry about, and he doesn't have to time to listen to idiots vomiting advice at him."
"You are a holder of the Knight's Cross and a veteran of the Eastern front," Langer says. "I would hardly call you an idiot."
Franz sticks his head up through the gunner's-hatch before I can reply. He is young, seventeen, a fresh recruit. He is trying desperately to grow a moustache, but only a few sparse hairs have taken root. "Captain, I must get to the post office."
"Yes, of course," I say. He vaults from the turret straight to the ground. I can only shake my head. It is a fine way to ruin young legs.
Franz has an aunt in Berlin who seems to write to him every day. Even I am secretly jealous of this. According to her last letter, the enemy had stepped up its day-and-night bombing. That was two weeks ago. He has not heard from her since.
"I swear," Langer says. "The only bad thing about this place is there are no women! If I don't find one tonight I will take a goat to bed."
"Good idea," Jorgi says as he wearily climbs up through the driver's hatch. "A goat cannot tell anyone how small your Pimmel is."
"You dare insult the great and invincible Langer? I'll show you!" Langer casts about until he spots a rock on the ground.
In a quick motion he scoops it up and pitches it toward Jorgi. The rock sails over Jorgi's head and bounces off the front-slope armor of the turret.
Jorgi laughs mockingly as he slides down off the hull.
"What's wrong? Is the great and invincible Langer unable to hit anything smaller than a Canadian Sherman? Is a large stand of trees more to his skill, perhaps?"
"Piss yourself away!" Langer says, his fists balled.
"Enough of that!" I snap. "Get going, both of you. Go drink or sleep or whatever it is you've been thinking about for the last week. I don't want to see either of you again until tomorrow."
"Yes, sir." They mumble a reply, salute, and go their separate ways into the night. In the dim light, my grandfather's gold-and-platinum pocket-watch points to 9:30.
A pot-bellied figure emerges from the small shack erected next to the A-frame: Feldwebel Konig. Konig is the maintenance sergeant that keeps our Panther operational.
"Good evening, captain," he says, slurring a bit. He might be drunk, be he does not sway, never sways. He is like oak. "It is good to see you back. Has there been good hunting?"
"Some. On the road to St. Pierre-sur-Dives. We ambushed a column of Canadian Shermans. Killed five before the rest lost their nerve."
"Do you need anything?" Konig asks.
"Petrol, we're nearly dry. And lubricants. The tracks squeak over the road wheels so loudly that I couldn't sneak up on a dead man. One of the bastard guide-teeth is bent, I'm sure. We'll have to replace it."
"I'll see what I can do," Konig says and bends to look at the eight road-wheels on the nearest side. I can take comfort, at least, that he is a man of his word. "Petrol has been in short supply lately. Haven't you heard?"
But I am already gone.
#
I find Marie Colette de Germaine at the watering trough behind her farmhouse. She wears a white cotton shrift with embroidered vines across the front. Here-and-there the vines explode into blossoms of red and yellow thread. Her chestnut hair hangs in loose braids tied by scraps of white lace-the remnants of what I brought her from Paris.
The moon glints off her arm as she lifts a cloth and dips it into the trough, squeezes, and scrubs damps streaks down the length of her long, well-toned calf-muscle. First one leg, then the other.
She looks up, startled, as the creaking symphony of frogs from the nearby L'Orne River go quiet. Distant thunder, an anti-aircraft barrage, arrives from far to the north. The plow-horses I can hear inside their decrepit barn whinny in reply.
"Be careful," I say in my awful French as I step out of the shadow of her house into the moonlight. "Not to scrub too hard. You must have enough strength left for me."
"Henri!" She drops the rag and seems to float across the yard into my waiting arms. Her cheek presses against my chest, ignoring the smell of old sweat, and grime, and petrol exhaust that has permeated my green-gray uniform. "I was so worried for you today. The fighting seems so close!"
"The English are bombing Caen." As bad as my French is, her German is even worse. We've been learning from each other for eight months. "There is nothing to be afraid of, for now. We are too small for their bombers to find us here."
I am fairly certain that Marie Colette is Maqui, the French resistance. I suspect that most French women are, but Marie Colette has had many opportunities to kill me. Perhaps I talk in my sleep and give her secrets.
"The Americans?" she asks.
"West of Villers-Boccage." I strip off my service cap and toss it to the mossy, fecund ground. "Weeks away, at least."
Her slim fingers find the buttons on my service jacket and quickly it slips from my shoulders. I sit, then lay back and close my eyes for, what I promise myself, will only be a moment.
I wake when Marie Colette kneels at my feet and lifts one of my boots into her lap. She unknots the laces and pulls it off, dumping it to the side, then peels off a pungent sock. After a week spent rolling through the French countryside in the June heat, my feet smell like a goat's ass.
Once my well-scuffed boots rest side-by-side, she reaches for my belt. Within moments I am clothed only in my undershorts, and soon, not even that.
"What will happen to you, to us?" she asks as she rubs my filthy head with a bar of strong-smelling soap, the same kind that she uses to wash my clothes.
