All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

35: Cards

Ending up as a prisoner of war was a problem Posey hadn't considered prior to landing in occupied France. Now, though, it was all that was on her mind. She wouldn't be able to hide the fact that she was a woman then, she was sure, and she didn't dare imagine what the Germans would do when they found out.

She knew she shouldn't think about it - after all, she had enough to worry about already, lost in where she hoped was Normandy without having seen a soul for hours - but her mind ran away from her. She couldn't seem to make it stop.

She'd stuck to the trees for the better part of what she thought might be two hours, though in the middle of the night with no sign of the sun beginning to rise it was impossible to know for sure. Eventually, she convinced herself she'd never get anywhere by sticking to the trees - she needed to get to Sainte Marie du Mont, and that was a village, not a forest - and lowered herself to the floor, army crawling across a field until she found herself at a rivulet.

For a person who seemed to make exclusively terrible decisions, all she seemed to be doing today was having to make more of them. Should she cross the rivulet or stay on this side? Go upstream or down? Her head spun trying to decide which would be the best option, all the while her ears strained to listen for voices. If she could find one person, just one Allied paratrooper, she knew she'd feel a lot better. For now, she was lost; with no gun, no compass, no map, and no watch, she could've been wandering around in circles, or worse, the completely wrong direction, for all she knew.

She crossed the rivulet, stepping over it in one go to avoid having water seeping into her boots - she did not need to squelch her way across Normandy and be found by the enemy that way, that was perhaps the worst way to be found she could think of - and dropped down onto her stomach again. Then she crawled, and crawled, and crawled, desperately thankful for that PT course back at Toccoa. It was serving her well now.

Posey had no idea how much time had passed, but as the sky began to lighten she found her elbows buckling underneath her, her forehead slamming into the ground. She must have been crawling that way for hours and she still hadn't come upon any sign of life. As she lay in the dirt - head pounding, sweat dripping out of her hair and down the back of her neck, muscles screaming - she came to the only viable conclusion: she'd gone the wrong way.

She let herself rest for a while, panting into the earth and forcing back the tears which stung in her eyes. After what could have been fifteen minutes or could have been three hours, she pushed herself back up onto her elbows with all of the strength she had left in her and crawled the last few meters into a set of trees. Only then did she let herself sit up and take a proper look at where she was.

The sky was a patchwork of hazy yellows and tentative pinks, just beginning to lighten and still working to chase the dark blue of night away. The day was going to be hot by the looks of things; the sun was only just visible but the humidity was stifling. Posey tugged the collar of her ODs away from her neck and sighed at the rush of cool air hitting her wet skin.

Opposite her lay a field, seeming somehow even more endless now that she was looking at it than it had when she'd been crawling through it, her head down and breath heavy through gritted teeth. The thought that she would have to cross back through such a wide open space, and in the light this time, had a sick, heavy feeling settling into her stomach. She dug her hands into the damp soil and wrenched out handfuls of dirt, throwing them both immediately back down again and then repeating over and over. She was staring into space, the weight of her exhaustion finally beginning to settle and make her eyelids feel heavy, when a knife was pressed to her throat.

"Qui êtes vous?"

"Oh my God."

"Anglais?" the deep, gravelly voice questioned in response to the mistake she recognised too late.