Tom had hoped that it would be a diversion for Margaret too. John had described how devoted she was to their parents and to her work, almost to her own detriment. “She could use some loosening up,” he’d once said. So the letters were a lark. A pastime between two people when they most needed it.
But it had become more. He could sense it. At least on his part.
Her letters had become like air.
And, like air, a shift could create a storm.
He’d never missed William more. He could use his friend’s advice. John’s too.
What would happen at the end of the war? When she expected her friend to return to the States and come to meet her?
He’d cross that bridge when he came to it.
And there was a fair chance he wouldn’t live long enough to find out.
Tom knew his thoughts were addled with the acutely felt despair of watching too many friends bleed to death and the helplessness that accompanied it. And so he would save any decisions about writing Margaret for another day when his head was more clear and disaster behind them.
Besides, there was no paper with which to write. And if there were, it would serve them better as cigarette rolls. Some of the men had become desperate enough to light up blades of grass just to find relief in the smoky scent.
The letters would have to be written only in his mind—the thread by which he hung, clinging to memories of another life. But the hope that he might someday be able to send them was just about the only thing that kept him in the fight.
Dear Margaret, he imagined.
We’d hoped a victory in Holland would give purpose to the many losses we’ve suffered. But it was not meant to be.
Churchill and Roosevelt and Field Marshall Montgomery cooked up a plan for tens of thousands of airborne troops to descend on the Netherlands—specifically the territory between Eindhoven and Nijmegen—securing nine bridges that would cut off the Germans. The Market operation. The Garden operation would employ ground troops and armored vehicles to take over and bulge into German territory.
The 101st Airborne was supposed to commandeer the bridges at Son en Breugel, but when we arrived, the Germans had already destroyed the Wilhelminakanaal at Son. Our mission failed before we even touched the ground.
Tom could still hear the reverberation of the gunfire that had been all around them. He wanted to forget it. But to forget it meant that it would be lost to history. And history had that terrible habit of repeating itself if one didn’t learn from it.
Building a makeshift bridge put our operation behind by half a day, allowing the German troops to rally and keep Allied troops from the ultimate objective: crossing the Rhine. Other bridges that had not been secured meant that reinforcements arrived later than planned.
Four days. Four whole days that the airborne had fought off the Germans with none of the support they’d been promised.
Cold, weary, broken.
Dead.
It had been the largest operation attempted by the new airborne division of the army. Had the defeat jeopardized its fledgling status? Twenty thousand men had descended by parachute, fourteen thousand by gliders.
Early projections were reporting that seventeen thousand men had been lost.
Seventeen thousand men. The nearest town of note near his home was Williamsburg. Nine thousand people lived there. It was as if all of Williamsburg were wiped out. Two times over.
It was nearly impossible to fathom.
A sniffle shook him from his memories. He couldn’t write these words to Margaret. They were too bleak. They lacked the poetry that William had eked out of him. She deserved more than a broken soldier’s sadness.
He was grateful there was no paper.
In the darkness, he couldn’t tell who had made the noise—someone from his unit? Or one of the British or Polish boys who were scattered in the area? The sniffle turned into a wail and oddly, it created a fissure in the hardness of his heart.
Like him, some unknown soldier had also found a hole in the darkness to rest in. If he had to guess, many woeful souls were hidden across the battlefield, wallowing for a few minutes before returning to their units for the night. Where they’d have to muster the façade of bravery. Where they’d have to pretend that they were grateful to not be among the dead, living to do this all over again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after.
Tom’s father had never admitted to feeling frightened in combat. Sobel had been an impenetrable fortress and the men suspected that he had no emotions built into him at all. But Winters—God bless Captain Winters—had told his men that a hero is not a man who doesn’t know fear. It’s a man who does know fear and faces it head-on.
For Captain Winters, if not for himself or anyone else, Tom would rally in the morning and be the stalwart soldier that he had to be and he would press on.
But not tonight. Tonight, he would mourn in darkness all that had been lost.
* * *
“Lord almighty, have you looked outside?”
Gladys and Margaret were sleeping in twin beds in an upstairs bedroom at Dottie’s house. Gladys’s words stirred her from a deep sleep, where she’d dreamed of William and Tom, their faces interchanging. They went from eating egg salad sandwiches at an Automat in Brooklyn to fighting on a stormy battlefield, the two moments sequentially seamless. She closed her eyes and one man pulled her into his arms. But she woke up before she could discover which one it was.
What lingered was the feeling he’d given her—as if resting her head on his shoulder allowed her to melt into his strength and find respite from the troubles of the world.
It felt like a brand-new definition of home, one that she didn’t fully understand.
She rubbed her eyes as Gladys pulled back the bedroom’s curtains.
“Seriously, Mags. I’ve never seen anything like this. Come here.”
Margaret swung her legs over the side of the bed, surprised that she was wearing the pajamas that Dottie had laid out for her because she didn’t even remember putting them on.
She did remember drinking copious amounts of wine with the girls after Dottie returned from nursing Joanna and putting her down for the night. Lighting a fire in the dark was a feat that had them descending into a giggle fit, but they’d managed it and sat with it until its embers had cooled.
Her mouth felt sticky and all she wanted to do was brush her teeth. But she followed Gladys’s voice and trudged over.
What a disaster. Debris and rocks and shingles and branches littered the yard. Electric lines sagged and their poles were bent like broken skeletons.
It was the ideal tonic for a hangover. The clouds in her head dissipated and her blood raced. Is this what Gladys felt like when she marched for her causes? Because Margaret felt an unfamiliar urge to go out there and hoist limbs and bring her town back to life.
“It’s what I imagine a battlefield to look like,” she said. “And this is just what we see from Dottie’s window.”
“I’m sure Oliver will be traipsing through it all day. This is definitely something his editor might want to hear about.”
“I don’t think they get hurricanes in England, do they?” Margaret asked.
“Not that I know of. He’ll be good at conveying it with words, though. Oliver’s articles are chock-full of description. I can’t wait to see what he thinks of this.”