CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Patchou on the Battlefield
A FEW minutes after André left Victor, Captain Dobie, Weller, their colonel, and his aide were poring over a map. They were hidden under trees, a mile and a half from the stone barn.
They looked up every moment or two toward St. Sauveur.
“Things are going along fine,” the colonel said. “The engineers have got a rubber pontoon bridge over the Douve River, and troops are crossing there already. They’ll have a steel one over the river for the tanks to cross, in an hour or two.”
Dobie nodded. “How soon do you think we’ll be sending our first patrols into St. Sauveur?” he asked.
“By sunset,” the colonel said. “As soon as the 9th gets the rest of these towns around here cleaned up, we’ll send our fellows through. How are those new lieutenants I sent you, Dobie?”
Captain Dobie grinned. “Schoenfargle took forty-seven prisoners yesterday. And Ouvarski’s squad took over a hundred. That answer your question, Colonel?”
The colonel laughed. But his aide suddenly held up a hand. “Wait a second. SOS of some kind on the field telephone. Yes, yes ... I get you. Yes. Ouvarski ... a dozen men. What? Trapped in a barn.... Okay.... But where, man, where?”
He saw the colonel reach out, and handed the phone to him.
The colonel consulted the map and noted the position of the barn. After a minute’s delay, he got a battery commander by radio. Calmly, he gave the map location.
“Have that stone barn boxed in by your guns,” he ordered. “Fire for five minutes exactly—and then quit. We’ll have relief troops ready to move in then.”
He handed the phone to Weller.
“I’m going down to the bridges now, Dobie,” he said.
Captain Dobie looked white. “Ouvarski trapped,” he repeated. “Can we spare enough men right now to get them out, sir?”
The aide said, “Why not?”
The colonel put a thin, dirty hand on Dobie’s arm. “You know we’ll get Ouvarski out. And my orders to you, sir, are to stay right here. You have my authority to make your man, Slim, a sergeant. Send him in command of the Ouvarski rescue bunch. Keep Weller with you. And you, Dobie, in future, try not to be so all-fired brave.”
The captain turned to catch Weller’s eye as the colonel marched across the road to his own hidden jeep.
“He sounds,” Dobie said, “a good deal like me talking to André, doesn’t he?”
But his smile was short.
“So Slim’s a sergeant at last,” he said. “Get him on the radio. Tell him to pick up fifteen or twenty men and we’ll meet him down the road.”
“But Captain,” Weller exploded, “the colonel said—”
“Ouvarski’s my lieutenant, and a brave one. It’s my job to see that he and his men get out alive,” Dobie snapped.
“Okay, sir,” Weller said. “It’s me’ll get courtmartialed. But pay no heed.”
The jeep bounded and took to the road.
A few moments later they met Slim with a truckload of men, and instructed him to follow. They whirled past a château set on a hill, with a scattering of cottages on its lower slopes.
Weller tilted rapidly around high stone walls, and pulled up in the shelter of a cottage near the château gates.
“Can’t get any closer,” Weller said firmly. “Ouvarski must be in that barn over there.”
“We’ll stay here till the shelling that the colonel ordered is over,” Dobie ordered.
Slim had his men out of the truck and ready to move in.
Without warning, from unseen guns, a barrage of shells circled the barn. The men crouched near the jeep winced under the explosive pressure on their ears.
Captain Dobie had been watching his stopwatch. Five minutes later he said, “All right, Slim, shelling’s over. Fan your men out, and take those Nazis in.”
The new sergeant and his men moved rapidly ahead, skirting the cottage wall.
They had just disappeared around the corner when Dobie cried sharply, “What in the name of—”
Weller had sprung headlong from the jeep and lunged at a sunken doorway.
A moment later he returned, breathing hard, with a dog in his arms.
“Patchou!” Dobie shouted.
Weller, his face tilted away from Patchou’s loving tongue and scrambling paws, pitched the dog into Captain Dobie’s lap.
“If this means what I think it means,” he puffed rapidly, “André’s somewheres about. Maybe you can figure it out, sir....”
Without waiting, he was gone, clanking with grenades, his head lowered between determined shoulders.
Straining forward in the jeep, Captain Dobie sat raging at his helplessness. He knew he would be useless in the field. He could barely walk. But every rifle crack, every grenade explosion sent his blood boiling. To think of André exposed to all this was a maddening extra anxiety.
He kept a hand on Patchou, who was torn between the joy of reunion with an old friend, and terror.
Dobie smoothed his fur absently while he directed his binoculars toward the heavy firing about the barn. He could not see much that was happening, because of the cottage wall, and stared around the fields. “If André’ll only keep under cover till this shooting stops,” Dobie thought.
He stiffened at the smell of timbers burning, and looked back to the barn quickly.
Slim appeared around the corner of the cottage and ran up toward Dobie.
“Cap’n,” he panted. “More—” He stopped and stared wildly. “What’s that dawg! That ain’t—It is Patchou! Well, for cryin’ out—”
“More what?” the captain snapped.
“More trouble, Cap’n. The barn’s afire in one corner. An’ we ain’t got half the Germans yet. They’re hid everywhere. If Ouvarski and the men have to make a break for it, there’s still enough Nazis to pick ’em all off.”
Dobie reached for the radio switch. Turning to Slim, he barked instructions.
“I’ll order smoke shells to cover their escape. Go out there and warn the men to pull back a little. Where’s Weller?”
Slim poised on one foot to answer.
“He’s fightin’ mad—an’ he’s fightin’ good.”
He disappeared into a thicket to carry out the captain’s order. Dobie spoke rapidly into the radio and then signed off.
For a while he sat listening, and watching the smoke billow high above a gable of the barn.
He heard loud, sputtered German orders. Then came renewed rifle bursts, and a grenade exploded near by.
Just before the outburst, Patchou gave a high, excited yelp and leaped from the jeep.
“Patchou!” Captain Dobie shouted furiously. “Come here, boy. Patchou!”
The dog streaked, with flying tail, back toward the château gates, stretched to his utmost to cover ground.
With piercing yelps of delight he jumped into the arms of a girl. She had turned at his barking and then suddenly run to meet him.
Captain Dobie regarded the slim figure with amazement. Slacks, army jacket, man’s cap from which soft black hair like André’s escaped. And the same gray-blue eyes.
A flash of enlightenment burst over Dobie.
Irritated to fury, he muttered, “Jumping Jehosophat! Now we have Marie Gagnon!”