She-Wolf

Part Three

Theresa watches the trucks rumble past, each of them carrying armed men in trenchcoats, many of them bearing yellow Volkssturm armbands. She catches a glimpse of many of their faces, each of them grim and anxious, tightly clutching rifles and Panzerfäuste. The trucks grind the mud under their wheels, rumbling down the road away from the village, finally disappearing around the bend behind the treeline.

The garrison was called out this afternoon, assembled in a way so helter-skelter that one might have figured it was a big hurry-up-and-wait. From the western horizon echoes the distant boom and crackle of gunfire and artillery—the sound of the approaching British, moving faster than anyone had anticipated. The men in the trucks are going to meet them head-on. As for Theresa and the girls, they are auxiliaries, meaning that they were to run ammunition and messages, spot targets for artillery, seldom touching a gun but for self-defence.

At least, that's what Theresa imagined they would be doing. Instead, they have been digging in at the treeline next to the road leading out of the village. Theresa is not entirely sure, but the scuttlebutt is that Bürgermeister Braun had found a way to get Kreisleiter Junker to keep the girls away from the fighting. Perhaps all the grievances of people such as Theresa's father had moved them in some way or another. Though at their feet lay an assortment of weapons at their disposal: rifles, Panzerfäuste and a single MG 34 with at least two belts of ammunition. So the prospect of staying out of direct combat seems rather doubtful. All they can do is hope, hope like fools that the line holds and the Brits do not come this way.

Theresa looks around at her comrades, her compatriots. They are five in all, including herself, Kristina, Elke Turnau and Johanna Francke and their Gruppenführerin Sophie Voss. All of them are part of Theresa's group of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, with Kristina being the youngest and most recent addition following her fourteenth birthday, when she graduated from the Jungmädelbund, the Young Girls' League, to the Bund Deutscher Mädel proper. All of them had done their share of field work and other community services. All of them talked about when they would get married and have their first child, which would result in them leaving the Bund (preferably they would have graduated from the Bund before getting married). None of them figured that they would one day be digging trenches at the side of the road in anticipation of an attack, still less be training with rifles, machine guns and Panzerfäuste.

Sophie Voss is dressed in an expensive-looking coat with a matching pair of boots. She has even procured a helmet for herself. She does not assist Theresa and the others in the hard manual labour, rather she stands like some self-made officer, surveying the operations, snapping orders to her underlings. When asked if she can help out some, Sophie's response was short and straight to the point: "I'm the Gruppenführerin, not anybody's servant girl."

Theresa managed—just barely—to keep herself from laughing at such an answer. Which she found rather strange since all day she has felt as though laughing, or for that matter smiling or feeling anything positive, was an impossibility. The entire afternoon she has thought of nothing but Father. The image of his body hanging from the lamp post, the way he slowly rotated on the noose, his pale, lifeless face, his empty eyes staring back into her soul.

Instinctively she side-eyes Kristina. She has barely made eye contact with Kristina all afternoon, let alone spoken with her. But she has heard her sniffling, and on a few occasions, crying softly. At one point, Elke Turnau comes over to Kristina to inquire what's the matter.

Kristina hesitates before murmuring in a choked voice, "My father..." A sniffle and a heavy, shaky inhale. "I never saw it. But my sister did. She...she said they...hanged him this morning. I..." A pause as Elke moves her hand to her mouth in shock. "I didn't...I still can't believe it."