Hope Takes Flight (20 page)

“You'll be okay. This is rough on everybody.” Owen made a mental note to stick close to the boy and try to deflect some of the worst of the ribbing.

After the men had all received their injections, they were led to the barber shop. Castellano was the first to crawl up into the chair.

“And would you like to keep your hair, sir?” the barber, a corporal, asked politely.

Eddy ran his hand through his black curly locks. “Yeah, I would.”

“Then you'd better get a sack!” A laugh went up from the other barbers at the old joke.

Eddy flushed but could do nothing more than sit helplessly while the barber ran a pair of clippers down the middle of his head, leaving two mountains of black hair on each side. Then the rest fell, covering the floor with black curls.

“There you go, soldier,” the corporal said. “Them cooties won't have nothin' to hold onto now!”

Soon the squad, naked heads shining, arrived at the quartermaster's shed. They drew mess kits, blankets, a bed sack to stuff with straw, and a uniform. When they were dressing, Kayo Pulaski yelled, “Hey, this crummy thing's too tight!” Pulaski, a husky, foul-mouthed man of twenty-seven, had been a fighter, although not a very successful one as far as victories in the ring were concerned. But he was right about the uniforms, as Owen discovered when he pulled his on.

The tight-fitting blouse was made of scratchy wool of the dullest olive drab. The jacket's high collar came up under his chin, and he had an idea it would rub his neck raw immediately. The trousers were like riding breeches, roomy in the seat and tapered toward the knees. The “wraps”—six-foot lengths of woolen bandage that were wound around each leg from knee to ankle—came last. The trick, they were informed by Sergeant Stone, was to make the wraps look smart without cutting off circulation in the legs. Boots came in two sizes—Too Large and Too Small. The outfit was crowned by a high-peaked campaign hat with a wide brim.

“I'd like to meet the designer of this crummy uniform in the dark,” Pulaski muttered. He stuck the hat on top of his shaved head. “I'd show him a thing or two!”

“Well,” Owen said, “I guess we'll see a little worse than this when we get to France.”

Sergeant Stone, standing nearby, scowled darkly. “You got that right. Now, you girls come on with me and we'll start makin' soldiers outta you.”

All through May, June, and July, Sergeant Stone struggled to turn his green farm boys and the soft city boys into battle-ready soldiers. He had little to work with, for weapons of every kind were in short supply in the training camps. Many a dummy labeled “Kaiser Bill” had his stuffing torn out by the rookies, lunging with bayonets tied to the end of broomsticks.

Despite these shortages, Stone was gratified to see the men hardening up. They learned to speak a new language, including
M.P.
(military police),
AWOL
(absent without leave),
shavetail
(second lieutenant), and
doggie house
(guardhouse).

Nasty details like digging latrines and filling sandbags became somewhat easier by singing nonsense songs such as “One Grasshopper Hopped Right on Another Grasshopper's Back,” and “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” But the song that was most familiar was written by a doughboy named Corporal Irving Berlin: “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning!”

Training for Owen had been a snap. He'd been in good shape to begin with and was accustomed to discipline. Only once, when Kayo Pulaski had tried to bully Tyler Ashland—the fat-cheeked, baby-faced rookie—had Owen experienced a bad moment. Stepping between the two, Owen had gone outside with Pulaski and had toyed with the ex-prelim fighter, letting him tire himself, before knocking him out with one swift blow to the chin. Then he'd picked Pulaski up and made a friend out of the man, winning the undying gratitude of Ashland and other young recruits he had helped. And by the end of their training period, Owen Stuart was awarded his corporal's stripes.

But the one recruit he'd wanted most to befriend turned a cold shoulder to him. “I don't need none o' your preachin',” Eddy Castellano had said defiantly, “and I don't need you to fight no battles for me, Owen. I can take care o' myself! I know I promised Nick I'd listen to you, and I will—about soldierin'—but that's all, see?”

“Okay, Eddy,” Owen said regretfully. “I know it's tough on a young guy like you to be put under wraps. But if I can be of any help, I'm always here.”

By the end of August, it was time to ship out. Sergeant Stone came in one day, saying, “Okay, we're about ready to go over the Big Pond. There's gonna be one big review. Blackjack himself is gonna be here, so I want my outfit to look better than anybody else's. Now get all your equipment ready.”

The big review took place in New York City. The first contingent of American soldiers to cross the Atlantic Ocean put on quite a show for the whole country. They marched down the main street under a storm of confetti, performed drills on some of the larger fields, and were given heroes' send-offs by the city.

After all the festivities, Owen stood at the dock, saying good-bye to Allie and to Amos and his family. Down the way he could see Nick and Anna Castellano telling Eddy good-bye. There was nothing ominous about the scene to most of them, but Amos was painfully aware that of all the thousands of men boarding these ships, not all would return.

“Don't worry,” Owen whispered to Allie, “I'll be back.”

Allie held him tightly. “Oh, Owen! I couldn't live without you—!”

Just down the wharf, Anna was clinging to her son Eddy. She had grown plump over the years, and she held him as if she couldn't bear to let him go. “Oh, Eddy, Eddy!” she moaned.

Eddy endured the embrace, then kissed her fondly on the cheek. “Aah, don't worry, Mama. I'll go over and teach those Huns a lesson, then I'll be back.” He glanced at Nick and winked. “When I learn a few tricks over there, I'll be about ready to take over from you, big brother.”

Nick forced a smile. “Sure, kid. That's the way it'll be.”

The ship's horn gave three short blasts, and the sergeants and noncoms marched the soldiers on board the ships, and soon they were sailing out of the harbor.

These troop ships, really converted ocean liners, were unlike anything the men had ever imagined. No longer proud sea queens, they were painted in gray, black, and white stripes to confuse U-boat commanders. The vessel that Owen and his squad was on carried upward of nine thousand troops, three times their normal capacity. Living quarters were so cramped you couldn't move without stepping on someone. The sergeants would be forced to work overtime, breaking up fistfights, but most of the men remained too seasick to get out of bed.

The land started fading into the distance, and Owen shoved through the throng to stand beside the members of his squad at the rail. Silence fell over them as they stood waving to the crowds on the wharf.

“This is gonna be great!” Eddy said.

Owen thought about what lay ahead, then looked out to see Allie growing smaller as the ship cleared the harbor. “No,” he said sadly, “it won't be great, Eddy.”

T
he small town of Villengen bordered the prison camp where Gavin Stuart was taken. Villengen was in Baden, a small section of Germany lying on the east bank of the upper Rhine River. Across the surface of Baden, the high plains and the mountains of the Black Forest rose up spectacularly. The camp itself, surrounded by barbed wire and considered to be escape-proof, was outside the village.

On the morning he was brought in, Gavin took one look around as the steel gates slammed behind him and vowed,
I'll get out of this place or die trying!
He was assigned to one of the barracks housing thirty other prisoners. But during the first two weeks, he found it was not as bad as he had expected. The food was plain, consisting mostly of potatoes with an occasional portion of pork, but the farmers round about were enjoying bumper crops, so prisoners were fed vegetables fairly regularly. The prisoners themselves were a mixed lot of French, Belgians, English, and a few other nationalities thrown in.

On his entrance into the barracks, Gavin met a young man of twenty-two by the name of Harry Douglas, whose distinct dialect gave him away at once.

“Take that bunk. It'll ha' fewer bedbugs than the rest, I think,” said Douglas.

“Thanks,” Gavin murmured and tossed the few items of clothing he had been issued on the bunk, then sat down. It was quiet in the barracks, most of the men being outside, and he turned to the young man. “You been here long?”

“Aboot three months,” Douglas replied with a broad Scots accent. “What's your outfit?”

“Lafayette Escadrille.”

Douglas lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “We've heard aboot ya. Got shot doon, I suppose?”

Gavin nodded. “That's it. But I got shot down with class. Baron von Richthofen himself did the honor.”

“Aye, he's a real fighting mon, so I hear.” Douglas nodded. “Weel, this is no' a bad place for sittin' oot the war. The food's not Scottish, but it's pretty good for the bloody Krauts.”

“What about escape?” Gavin asked instantly. “I don't plan to spend the rest of my life in this place.”

“Ah, weel now, that's a noble aspiration.” Douglas grinned. “But it's no picnic, gettin' oot o' here. The place is guarded like the Bank o' Scotland. There've been three attempts in the last two months and no' a man o' them got ootside. All but one was shot doon just ootside the wire.” He stared curiously at his young neighbor. “It'd take quite a magician for a mon to get oot o' this place.”

Gavin shook his head stubbornly. “I'm not going to stay here,” he said. “This war's going to go on for a long time, and I'm not going to rot in a prison camp.” He walked to the window and looked outside where the barbed wire fences rose in the distance. “That piece of barbed wire was put there by a man. And anything a man can do, some other man can
un
do.”

Douglas continued to study the young flyer. “Ah, I feel the same way, laddie, but a mon would have to be a bird to fly over that wire. Or a mole to tunnel under it. They check three times a day. We all line up, and if a mon's missing, they throw a cordon round the whole camp, thick as fleas.” He dropped his head sadly. “If you think o' anythin', let me know. I'm the mon to go wi' you, if you find a way oot o' this place, that is.”

The days stretched into weeks, and Gavin endured his captivity with an impatience he did his best to suppress. He got no letters, and he wrote none, but during the long days and even longer nights, he thought and dreamed of home…and of Heather Spencer. The possibilities of escape seemed to be diminishing, although he and Harry Douglas spent hours and hours making plans. Some of them were fantastic and totally unrealistic; all of them seemed impractical. He grew fond of the young Scot and the two formed an exclusive club, the focus of which was escape.

June, however, with all of its balmy breezes and warm sunlit days, seemed the ideal time to break out. They walked around and around the inside of the compound, gazing at the high mountains of the Black Forest.

“If we cud just get into those woods, I'd take my chances,” Harry said one day. “But getting oot o' this place…I don't know, Gavin. Seems like it canna be done.”

“It can be done, Harry!” Gavin retorted stoutly. “We've just got to find a way!”

Not long after that conversation, two prisoners constructed crude ladders, set them against the barbed wire, and had just reached the top when they were cut down by machine gun fire. Another group made a flimsy bridge of small pine boards from Red Cross boxes and tried to scale the high fences. They, too, were shot down. After both escape attempts, all prisoners were lined up into ranks and addressed by the Commandant, who informed them harshly that the guards had been instructed to shoot to kill any man who touched the fence in the future. In fact, he insisted, they would be better to stay at least ten feet away from the fence itself.

A month after the last escape attempt, Gavin lay in his bunk staring into the darkness, his brain fluttering like a bat as he reviewed the possibilities of breaking out of the camp. Getting over that fence had become the biggest goal of his life, and he knew that he would give twenty years of whatever time he had left just to be on the outside.

Wearily his mind turned over old schemes, rejecting them. Finally he tried to put it aside and lay in the darkness, thinking of other things—mostly of Heather—before reliving the instant he had been shot down by von Richthofen. He seemed to hear again the stutter of the German Spandau machine guns and the whistle of the slugs past his ear. Clenching his fists, he remembered the horror of going down, reliving the instant when his plane went completely out of control and plunged toward the earth and sudden death.

And then he remembered something he had evidently blocked out.
God…help me get out of this!
His frantic prayer came back with sudden clarity, and then he remembered that the plane had somehow, against all the laws of gravity, pulled out of the spin so that he was able to land.

That couldn't have been God!
Gavin thought stubbornly.
It was just an accident
. Nevertheless, the more he thought about it, the more he was forced to question his own beliefs. Owen had said,
God's in everything, Gavin. What we think is a coincidence may be something he puts in our way to help us. The things we feel are bad might turn out to be good. Don't ever give up on God.

All night long Gavin lay sleepless, thinking about his prayer—the first one he'd prayed in years—and his miraculous escape from death. Finally, almost in jest, he said silently,
Well, God, you've gotten me out of one mess. Let's see you get me out of this one!

Then strangely, even though he had not been serious, a quietness seemed to settle over his spirit, and a sudden assurance came to him. If a voice had spoken, it would have said something like,
I will show you what I am able to do.
That was all. He heard nothing, and he felt almost foolish. Yet for several days he pondered those words:
I will show you what I am able to do.

Finally, almost in desperation, lying again on his bunk with that phrase running through his mind, Gavin Stuart gave up. “All right, Lord,” he whispered very quietly so no one could hear, not even Harry, snoring in the bunk next to his. “I can't do anything for myself, so I'm asking you to show me what you can do.” He felt hypocritical as he prayed. He had not served God—in fact, he had run
away
from him—and now here he was asking God to do something for him. Nevertheless, he held his ground and whispered fiercely, “If you've spoken to me…then I want to see what you can do!”

Almost immediately an idea began forming in Gavin's brain. It came in small impulses of thought, but with such clarity that it was almost like watching one of those new motion pictures that had taken the country by storm. He lay there, his breathing short and choppy, as these “visions” flickered in his imagination. They did not last long and then they stopped, but he knew that it could not have been his own mind that had devised these things.

“Harry!” he whispered. “Harry, wake up!”

“Wh–What? What is it?”

Gavin waited until the Scotsman was awake, then he said, “I've got an idea.” Feeling constrained to at least be honest, he added, “It's probably going to get me killed.” He smiled thinly in the darkness. “I think God just spoke to me.”

The Scotsman was a devout Presbyterian and did not laugh, as Gavin had half expected. “Weel, now,” he said, “I canna think o' anyone I'd rather be hearin' from. What did the Guid Lord say?”

“Well, he said that he's going to get us out of this place. And here's the way it's going to be.…”

When Gavin had finished, Douglas nodded. “Only God himself could think up such a thing as that, so I think we'll ha' ta pay attention to the Guid Lord!”

It was 2:15 in the morning when the big arc lights that surrounded the camp, bathing the barbed wire fences in their harsh glare, suddenly went out. The instant they did, two men dressed in German uniforms dashed out of one of the barracks, both of them waving aloft what appeared to be pistols. In the darkness and confusion, as the guards began shouting at each other, the two men shouted back unintelligible German phrases. The gate that had been opened four minutes earlier to admit some trucks was shrouded in darkness for that one moment, and the two men joined the shuffling crowd of German guards, each of them carrying at his side a heavily laden canvas bag. The two threshed their way through the milling guards, slipped by the shadows of the convoy that was coming in, and quickly moved toward the edge of a wooded area, avoiding the glare of the truck's headlights.

The camp was filled with the shouts of the guards, and a siren went off, breaking the stillness of the night with its cacophonous scream. The two men crouched low and Gavin stumbled into a hole, sprawling on the ground. “Are ye all right, Gavin?” Harry whispered, pausing for a moment.

“Yeah, go on, let's get outta here!”

They scrambled madly and, with relief, entered a line of trees that apparently formed part of a second-growth forest. They plunged into the woods as the sounds faded and suddenly stopped. Glancing back, Gavin saw the lights go on. “We won't have much time. They'll have a head count right away after a thing like that.”

“Right. Now, how do we get past the ring o' guards that'll form, Gavin?”

Gavin had already thought this out long ago. In talking to several of the men who worked outside, cutting the trees for firewood, he had learned of a creek that ran along a bluff. The area was so heavily timbered and overgrown with scrub bushes the guards usually avoided it. Gavin was not sure where it was, but as best he could, he followed the directions he had received.

Three hours later they paused, completely out of breath, faces and hands scratched by the tangled underbrush, and threw themselves onto the ground. “I think we got through,” Gavin panted. They lay listening for what seemed an interminable time and heard faint shouts behind them. “They're forming a line,” he added. “They think they've trapped us inside.”

“It's only God's mercy we got this far,” Harry gasped. “But they'll be finding oot right soon that we're na in that ring, so we'll have to get oot o' here.”

Getting to their feet, the two men plunged again into the darkness.

For a week the two men, wet, miserable, and cold at night, lay hidden under rocks or dripping trees, for the rains had come. They moved on only during the deep blackness of the night hours, for these woods were dotted with woodsmen and hunters. They slept fitfully during the day, one keeping watch while the other slept. By now their feet were torn and bleeding, and when their food supply ran out, they lived on raw vegetables filched from farmers' fields and gardens.

Once they had the good fortune to run upon a chicken that had wandered away from a farmyard. Harry pounced on it and wrung its neck. Risking a small fire deep in the woods, they used small sticks to roast the bird over the glowing coals and ate it ravenously. When they had finished, they washed it down with water from a nearby creek and lay back, bellies full for the first time since their escape.

“You know, Gavin,” Harry began drowsily, “the more I think of it, the more I think God
did
speak to you. Tellin' us how to make the guns oot o' wood an' all o' that. And everything's gone just right.”

“I guess so, Harry. I don't know about things like that.” Gavin paused, his eyelids growing heavy. He was weary to the bone, they were still hundreds of miles from home, and he was discouraged. “I guess the Lord will have to do more than that, though, if we're going to get through. We've got a long way to go.”

After dark, they continued their journey and finally found themselves on a high cliff overlooking a river. “If I'm rememberin' my geography, right over that river is Switzerland,” Harry said. “Come on, let's go across.”

They waded down a little brook that ran under a railroad bridge passing directly through town, and finally, half underwater, they were suddenly carried downstream, both men losing their provisions in the swirling current.

Gavin saw that Harry kept going under and realized the man couldn't swim. He threw himself into the fast stream, bloated with the rains of recent days, grabbed Harry by the jacket and hauled him out. Coughing and gagging, Harry lay on the bank for a minute, and then the two dragged themselves onto the shores of Switzerland. They lay there, panting, and Harry said, “Weel, the Guid Lord sent the right mon to get me oot o' prison. I would've drowned if it hadn't been for you, lad.”

Gavin was exhausted, but he got up on his knees and strained to see ahead where the murky gray skies were surrendering to the dawn. It was time to move on. Taking a deep breath, he said, “Come on. Let's get out of here. I want to get Germany as far behind me as I can.”