Across a War-Tossed Sea Read Free Page A

his. Ron was the flagman to start us. You will not believe what happened! The lane is shaded by walnut trees, and a black snake fell off the branches, smack-dab onto Wes! It had been lurking up there waiting for some unsuspecting squirrel. A doozy of a serpent
—
six feet long! Nothing like it in England except maybe Nessie. But the brothers turned it loose because it keeps mice out of the crops.
    Of course, Wesley set off blubbering about it. Honestly, he does go on. Do you know he still stows Joey under his pillow? If the brothers find him with a stuffed koala bear, he will catch all manner of grief. They are good hearts, but a tough lot, farming and all, you know.
    Yours, Charles

Chapter Two
    â€œT here!” Charles stuck a red thumbtack into Sicily. He took a step back from the world map he’d hung on their bedroom wall to admire his trail of pins. “Now we’re talking.”
    Wesley stopped fanning himself with a Superman comic book. The brothers shared an attic room under the gabled eaves of the Ratcliffs’ green tin roof. Even though the white clapboard farmhouse was shaded by oak trees, they sweltered in warm months. That September afternoon the temperature had spiked back up to ninety, and their rotating circular fan only did so much good. But it was the only place for them in the three-bedroom house. The four American brothers were crammed together in one big bedroom on the second floor. Patsy, being the only girl, was given a small room to herself, and their parents occupied the last one.
    Wesley tossed the comic book and stood to look at the map more closely. “We’re doing better now, aren’t we, Charles?”
    â€œQuite!” Charles grinned at him. He pointed at the black-and-white photograph of Winston Churchill he’d pasted on the sloping ceiling. In it, Churchill made his famous V for Victory sign. “The Prime Minister showed us how to stand tall, all right. Remember what he said after Dunkirk, when France fell and we ended up facing Hitler all by ourselves?” Charles lowered his voice to a growl: “‘We shall not flag or fail.…’”
    Wes joined him: “‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.…We shall never surrender!’”
    â€œWell done!” Charles applauded Wesley’s recitation. He turned back to Churchill’s image. “Now that we Allies have taken Sicily and landed at Salerno, we’ve got Hitler’s Italian pals out of the fight at least. Maybe within the year, we can move up the boot of Italy and push the Nazis back over the Alps!” Jokingly, Charles saluted Churchill’s round, jowly face.
    In their bedroom, Charles tended to drop the American persona he was trying so hard to perfect and be unabashedly British with Wesley. He’d hung up a Union Jack flag, models of RAF Spitfires, and photos of their parents, plus the king and prime minister. Over Charles’s bed was a picture of his school cricket team. Their father, a geography teacher, coached it.
    Instinctively imitating his father’s teaching specialty, Charles had been tracking the progress of the Allied armies on his large map. He’d agonized over British defeats—retreats from Greece, Crete, and island after island in Southeast Asia. Finally, that spring, the tide had turned, starting in North Africa with the defeat of Rommel, Hitler’s “Desert Fox” tank commander.
    Charles continued, more to himself than to Wesley: “ If the Russians can survive Hitler’s siege of Leningrad, and if the Americans can finally invade France, and if the Allies can take all of Italy, we should be able to squeeze Nazi Germany from three sides.” He put his hands on his hips and cocked his head, looking at his maps like an army general planning a campaign. “The operating word here is if we can do all those things,” Charles muttered.
    It wasn’t looking so great in Russia, for