Chapter Text
PROLOGUE – March 1994
It had been raining earlier that morning, but now the drizzle had stopped, and a light, chilly mist shrouded the distant Virginia hills.
It was spring, but just barely. The gentle hills had turned pale green, and although the trees were still a tracery of black branches, there was a scent in the air of mud and new growth lurking just beneath the cold surface of the ground.
It was a quiet place, a place for meditation. Here, in the midst of it, there was no traffic noise from the freeways nearby. There were no other people. Just the dead, row after row of them, white crosses standing at attention upon green grass and patches of grey snow, as far as the eye could see – and here and there, an occasional Star of David to break the monotony.
The old man walked among the gravestones of Arlington National Cemetery, searching. Now and again, he used his cane, but more often he simply carried it. It was rather useless on this soft ground, anyway; he could walk just as well without it. The ground, woven together by short, still-green grass, carefully tended, pulled at his feet, hanging on to them as he walked. The thought crossed his mind, just briefly, that one day not so far in the future those feet – and the rest of him – would be lying beneath cold, soft ground like this. It was not a particularly unhappy or morbid thought. He had always prided himself on being realistic.
He glanced at the chart in his hand, squinting as he looked at the tiny print. Here. In this row – it must be…there! There it is.
He had found the grave.
He stood there for a moment, gazing at it.
A small, white, smooth marble cross. Just a name and the dates of birth and death, and the military rank. So simple. So misleading. The whole history of a man, reduced to a few lines carved in stone. Objects last; people don’t. How can that stone, how can that grave, hold all the vitality, the hopes and dreams of the man who once lived…?
And when the rest of us are gone – and the memories of the war are gone with us – what then? What will future visitors see as they pass by your grave…or mine?
He stood there, musing silently as the memories rolled back. How long have you been here now? More than 30 years under the ground, old friend. You died a hero, far away in another country. A country we hadn’t even heard of back then.
And me? I’m still here. Still getting along with this life. Doing my job. Fighting the good fight, I hope. Not the way you did. In my own way.
Behind him, he heard a car door slam. The mood was broken.
The slender girl walked purposefully toward him. She had left her car on the ridge above, and he smiled as she approached. She reminded him, as always, of nothing so much as himself when he was young, as young as she. Bold. Impatient. Perhaps a little too idealistic.
“Hello!” she greeted him, taking his hand and brushing his cheek with a quick kiss. “Sorry I’m late. The freeway was a horror. Thanks again for meeting me here.” Her voice still held just the hint of a Southern drawl, although the diction lessons she’d taken, back when she was a TV reporter, had erased almost all of it. “I know this probably wasn’t the best day for it, with everything that’s going on, so I want you to know how much I appreciate it. My editor gave me such a tight deadline on this one…”
“You don’t need to explain,” he interrupted. “When you told me about this story, I wanted to help you with it. Whatever I can do.”
“Well, of course I remembered the story from when you used to tell it to us, when we were little. When Glen proposed a special section in the magazine on the fiftieth anniversary of World War II, I knew your story was the perfect thing. You told me so much about him,” she said, pointing to the gravestone. “I wish I’d had the chance to meet him.”
“I wish that, too. You would have liked him. And he? He would have adored you.”
She colored a little, and he was secretly pleased. She saw the light in his eye and laughed.
“Grandpa, I declare that you must have been a terrible flirt in your day.”
“Quite true,” he quipped. “Irredeemable, everyone thought. Luckily for me, I found the right woman, and those days were quickly ended.”
The wind had picked up, and he shivered involuntarily. Time was when a wind like this, a muscular spring wind, would not have affected him, not at all. Not when he had been young and strong.
He saw her look sharply at him; she had noted the shiver. “Grandpa, I think we should go and sit in the car for a while. Or maybe drive to get a coffee? I have my tape recorder. I can interview you just as well in a café as here.”
“No, it’s all right. I’d like to just stand here for a moment more…” He looked down at the gravestone again.
“You and he were friends. That’s why I wanted to bring you here – to him – to start the story off,” she said quietly. “But you’ve never said how it all began. I have the feeling there was a lot more to it all than just the adventure you told us about when we were kids. How did it start?”
He was quiet for a few seconds, thinking. He chose his words carefully, knowing that she was remembering them all, fitting them into her story – that this would be the beginning of the tale that would be put down on paper, in print, at last, written for this new generation.
The generation that doesn’t remember our war. They read about it in the history books, and to them it is but a story, not real. Something that was long ago and far away.
But if they don’t understand it, if they don’t take it into themselves and know that all of it actually happened…then history can repeat itself, to our everlasting sorrow….
He took a deep breath.
“I don’t know all of it, of course. How it began on my side, not how it began on theirs. For some of their part, I can only made educated guesses. But this is how I know it, and this is how he told his side of it to me. It was 1944, and even by that summer, with some of the fiercest battles yet to come, we knew the war was drawing to a close…”
She turned on the small tape recorder, and the tiny reels whirled silently as he spoke.