I understood the reality of it, my heart sank, and I longed to be with my family again.
I’d just made my decision to hightail it back to our camp, when I heard a commotion up one of the streets and curiosity got the better of me. I followed the sound of raised voices, turned a corner, and found myself at the edge of a crowd gathered in front of the local armory. Cops prowled the perimeter, and I’d have turned away immediately but for the promise that came with the smell of hot soup and, even better, the yeasty aroma of fresh-baked bread. I couldn’t see the food because of the wall of bodies in front of me. I could, however, see a man standing on the steps of the armory, well above the heads of the crowd, and he was shouting through a megaphone.
“Hey, you fellas,” he hollered, “how many of you slogged through French mud or sat hip deep in stinking trench water or threw yourselves down on Gerry barbed wire?”
His question was answered with encouraging shouts and cheers.
“And how many of you saw your comrades-in-arms slaughtered before your very eyes?”
This didn’t get such an agreeable response, but it sent an audible ripple through the crowd.
“And what did they promise those of us who were lucky enough to come back? They promised us bonuses for our service, compensation for the horrors we witnessed or were a part of. But they told us we’d have to wait for our money. Well, we can’t wait. We don’t have jobs now, do we?”
There was a resounding chorus of “No!”, which made sense given the state of the clothing most of the crowd wore.
“And we have no roofs over our heads, and we don’t have food to feed ourselves or our families, do we?”
This really got to the crowd, and they raised their fisted hands and shouted, “No!”
“We need that money now. Today. Not years down the road. Hell, we’ll all have starved to death by then! Are you with me?”
Judging from the roar of approval the crowd delivered, they were.
That’s when the cops swept in. They came out of the side streets and the alleys carrying truncheons and shoving their way among the crowd, dividing them into islands of confusion, sending them running every which way.
“You, Mr. Cop, did you fight in France?” the man with the megaphone called out.
But I guessed not, because the policeman he’d addressed simply whacked him on the head with his billy club and I saw him tumble.
Chaos engulfed the scene, and I found myself buffeted by fleeing bodies and thrown against a brick wall. I crawled into the safety of an alcove that was the entrance to a printing shop, where I cowered until the street had emptied, and a man poked his head out the door of the shop and snapped, “Get on, boy. Don’t be loitering here.”
I quickly headed back to the railroad tracks and followed them out of the city, eager to return to the place where I’d left my brother and Emmy and Mose, wanting more than anything to be in the safety of my family again, surrounded by the comfort of our love. Sure, we sometimes got angry and yelled at one another, but we never swung billy clubs.
By the time I found where I’d joined the tracks that morning, it was late afternoon and the shadows were long across the land. I made my way down to the river, to the rock bluff where we’d stayed the night, my heart singing at the prospect of rejoining the others.
But when I reached the strip of beach where we’d camped, I was still alone. Everyone had gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I SPENT MY twenty-fourth birthday hunkered down inside the shell of a burned-out café in Brest, France, with German bullets cutting the air around me. I was scared but, honestly, not nearly as frightened as I’d been when I was twelve years old standing on that empty beach on the bank of the Minnesota River, thinking I’d lost the only family I had.
The remains of the fire still smoldered, and the sand still held the impressions of our bodies where we’d slept in the night, but the beach was empty. My first thought was that Albert had been so angry he’d convinced the others to abandon me. But he was my brother, and we’d been at each other’s throats before. He wouldn’t just desert me, no matter how far I’d pushed him. I looked