Casca 11: The Legionnaire Read Free Page A

dug from the fields or, when he was lucky, finding a dead horse that wasn't so far gone it couldn't be eaten. Once a plane, a Soviet Yak, flew overhead to drop leaflets in German announcing the death of Hitler and the unconditional surrender of all German forces. It was a wasted effort; everyone knew the war was over anyway.
    As he neared the Allied lines, the numbers on the roads increased to tens of thousands. Women pushed baby carriages piled with the few scraps of their lives they had been able to salvage before the Russians found them. Children held on to their mothers' coats so as not to get lost. On the sides of the roads were the bodies of those whose strength had not been great enough to go any further. They had just lain down and quietly died.
    It was nearly impossible to avoid the congestion. He was nearly r un over several times by fast mobile patrols of vans, racing back and forth over the Autobahn, playing what they liked to call German pool, where one gained points for how many he could run over at one time. They weren't interested in going through the drudgery of interrogating the thousands that were trying to flee from them. Up ahead were road blocks where specially trained troops would separate those they wanted to keep in their zone.
    Lagers saw planes overhead more frequently now. Fighters would fly low over the long lines of refugees, buzzing them but not firing. All the planes wore the markings of the British or American Air Forces. There were no German planes left to fly. Near Nuremberg, he took off cross country, not wanting to go through even the most cursory inspection by the Russian security forces. He knew that they would take one look at him and he would be packed off with the other escaping soldiers to the slave labor camps. The crippled and old were let go, but the ones who were capable of work would be forced to rebuild what had been destroyed in Russia, and the same time dismantle everything in Germany that could be taken apart and shipped back to Russia. He wondered why the Allies had held back so long and let the Russians take Berlin and so much other territory that they could have had under their control without having to fire a shot. For some reason they had given over to the Russians thousands of square miles of German territory. They had just stopped their advance and waited.
    He wished he still had his field jacket to keep him warm. The suit he was wearing was thin and did little to keep out the damp or chill of having to sleep in the open fields or under a pile of damp leaves. Cutting across country, he entered the woods. Near Regensburg, for the first time, he saw signs of the Allies. A lorry full of British To mmies roared past him on a dirt road to disappear in a cloud of dust. They never gave him a second look.
    Once past Regensburg, he found shelter for the night in a hayrick. He had just dropped off to sleep thinking that in a couple of more days he'd be in Switzerland when a pain in his ass brought him up to his feet. A bayonet had interrupted his rest. At first he thought his captors were English, but the Gallic accent that told him to get his hands up demonstrated clearly they were French. There were four soldiers carrying American weapons and wearing uniforms on which they wore the insignia of the Free French Army.
    "Deine Karte, jetzt! " They demanded his papers. Instead of answering them in German, he responded in good French, "I have none." The taste of the French words on his tongue was strange. It had been many years since he had spoken anything other than German or Russian. A hand torch lit up his face, blinding him for a moment as his captors looked him over. He stood stock still as practiced hands frisked him, taking the pistol from his waistband. The light went to his feet and the army boots still on them. The shoes of the civilian he had traded clothes with had been too small. A caporal chef pointed his M-1 carbine at his face and demanded to know, "What organization