The Kingdom of Night (Book 3)

Five - Audentes Fortuna Iuvat

George

It had snowed the other night. I knew because I'd heard the wind howling in through the cracks in the wall. When we got up and brushed the hay off our clothes, we saw it had piled up in drifts up against the door, and had to dig ourselves out much like the boys on the ground, fighting from the foxholes and shooting blindly at the enemy.

     'Well, isn't that just bloody great,' Paulie said, raking a hand through his dark curly hair and pulling his flight jacket closer around himself. 'Not as though we had enough bloody problems.'

     'There's a farmhouse out that way,' I said, pointing off into the distance. 'Maybe we could ask for directions.'

     Paulie gave me a strange sideways look. 'You don't speak any German, d'you, Skip?'

     I shook my head. Even if I wasn't able to, it was worth a shot. 'I could probably find a way to communicate, though.'

     We trudged through the snow, and I could feel it soaking through the bottom half of my flight suit. The farmhouse was just a short walk away, probably five minutes. The air was cold enough that it might've killed a man sleeping out in the open, but I was determined to not let that happen to us. We would make it home. We would survive this.

     I knocked on the door while Paulie hung back. He'd never been good at asking people for things. He got especially fidgety around women. I suspected it was because he'd grown up with four brothers, and was so used to being with men that women were practically foreign to him.

     An older woman in a brown dress answered, her grey hair in a long thick braid over her shoulder. She looked us up and down, her sharp eyes appraising us. Paulie was nervously glancing at the wooden spoon she was holding, like she'd suddenly whack him with it.

     'RAF?' she said in a thickly accented voice. I nodded. She must have seen enough of the uniforms to figure us out.

     She stepped aside, motioning us in. Gratefully we ducked inside, stomping the snow off our boots. After she'd sat us down at the small wooden table in the kitchen area, she went about preparing something that smelled hearty and rich on the stove. Most of the people in Germany didn't support the war, I had a feeling, or the Nazis, come to think of it. I was pretty confident she wouldn't turn us over to the German army.

     When she'd made sure we'd eaten the soup she'd made and were sitting by the hearth to start drying our clothes out, I had a feeling this would be the best time to ask. The next time she came over, I tapped her on the shoulder and indicated where I'd written "Hanover?" in charcoal on the floor, making a walking motion with my fingers.

     She nodded. 'Zwei Tages,' she said, holding up two fingers.

     'What'd she say, Skip?' Paulie leaned over after I'd thanked her and she'd gone again.

     'Two days,' I said. I wasn't fluent in German. I only knew Good day. But from that, I knew what we needed to do. If we got started now, we'd probably be in Hanover by the day after tomorrow, if our luck held.

     She pointed us in the right direction once we got out on the road about a half hour later. I took her hand gestures to say Keep walking, you'll eventually reach it. Again, I thanked her and pulled Paulie up the road in the direction she'd pointed us in. We'd be fine as long as we didn't run into the enemy out here, but intentions and reality rarely ever matched. I just had to hope.

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Alice

The news soon reached me that George had been shot down somewhere over Germany. It had been three days since his last sortie, and hadn't been seen or heard from since. The telegram from Mum said that much. Missing, presumed dead, they said. No one survived a plane crash unless they jumped out before it hit the ground. There was a small hope that was what George had done.