I do not consider Israel a civilized nation. (I wish it would have been, but sheesh and baksheesh, Germany is accruing beans faster on the civilized side of the scale.) I sincerely wish that America would stop sending money there. It is funding atrocities. This costs America a lot of civilized beans.
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- Elizabeth Barrette (
ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
- Mood:
busy
Intent to Kill
I do not consider Israel a civilized nation. (I wish it would have been, but sheesh and baksheesh, Germany is accruing beans faster on the civilized side of the scale.) I sincerely wish that America would stop sending money there. It is funding atrocities. This costs America a lot of civilized beans.
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Character notes for "Good Food Choices Are Good Investments"
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Character notes for "Good Food Choices Are Good Investments"
These are the character notes for "Good Food Choices Are Good Investments." Penina Trueblood -- She has tawny-fair skin, blue eyes,…
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Poem: "Good Food Choices Are Good Investments"
This poem is spillover from the May 4, 2021 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from chanter1944, technoshaman, and Anonymous. It…
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Poem: "Who Can Create the Future"
This poem is spillover from the May 4, 2021 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from chanter1944, technoshaman, and Anonymous. It…
June 6 2010, 18:47:36 UTC 11 years ago
Meanwhile, at the risk of being incredibly rude--
A Home Guard volunteer, with a sidelong swing of his arm, indicated where the lorry was to be parked. With that same arm in a continued flow of motion, he summoned workers, busy nearby, to the Heinkel. I would have only a few minutes to examine it before its decimation, savagely begun, would be properly and rationally finished.
German bombers are surprisingly small. I was able to jump onto a wing, then lean over the edge of the upper gun canopy mount. The canopy and gun had already been taken away.
Between a structural member and the sheet metal of the outer surface, I saw the corner of a torn away photograph, still wedged in place. Penciled in German script, I could read the words, “Wiedersehen. Muti.”
Pushing with my toes and stretching to reach this, I saw the rest of the photograph, still in shadow, on the floor. What I saw in the darkness beside it was puzzling. I seemed to be looking at a pan of chocolate-covered peanuts poured into a single slab. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I noticed a dirty Hitler Youth knife on the floor, and saw the sparkling claw of an open-end wrench wrapped in a filthy scarf. In another moment, confusion succumbed to stark clarity. This was a tourniquet.
Averting my eyes, wishing to avoid the obvious inference, I saw the chocolate-covered peanuts again, more clearly than I had before, and understood that I was looking at spent shell casings partially submerged in dried blood, which had pooled in the small, rectangular recess beneath the gunner’s position, where he stood while firing his gun. The blood had been deep enough to cover, for more than half their length, any of these thirty-caliber shell casings that had fallen upright into that recess.
I could now see that the shadow covering the photograph of the gunner’s mother was dried blood that had soaked through it, and glued it in place at the edge of a large, distended smear that marked where the gunner had fallen after losing his first three pints. I could see smaller hardened rivulets streaming out from the larger stains, where his filled, dripping boots had gushed as they dragged along behind him for the short distance he had crawled before another man, also wounded, had attempted to help him.
The Hitler Youth knife wasn’t dirty, but encrusted, and that scarf was a torn strip of a trouser leg, hastily cut at one end and saturated with the blood it had been too late to stop. There were dried trails of brown in crazed rings silently testifying to the frenzied efforts of a few desperate seconds and encircling the silhouettes of two flight jackets at rest, etched in a wet fresco on the floor of the Heinkel. In these splashed drippings and blotted spatters of their own blood, I could see where two cold and frightened “Eagles over England” had died in one another’s arms.
If you're an actual German,
and don't mind my asking,
is "Wiedersehen, Muti" the sort of thing his mother would have written?
O_O
June 6 2010, 20:43:45 UTC 11 years ago
I doubt I'd ever holler at someone for a linguistic digression on my blog. I'm too much a language maven for that, even if it's tangential to the topic. *ponder* On the whole, I think the snippet of fiction is a valuable contribution of food for thought, so thank you for sharing.
Re: O_O
June 6 2010, 21:11:10 UTC 11 years ago
You can read the whole first part of that novel
if you click the acol tag on my page.
You're on the filter, and it's free.
since you like it, here's a little more...
June 6 2010, 21:24:02 UTC 11 years ago
As the tide ran away, I could see more clearly the poured concrete blocks, massive and orderly, and evenly spaced in a line that seemed to go as far as the shore itself in either direction. At low tide, they would impede any tanks attempting to make their way inland. They would also tempt men coming ashore to hide in the apparent safety they offered. The few machine guns available were located on promontories overlooking these precisely positioned structures. Anyone hiding here would have their backs to a wall as they faced a firing squad. At high tide, the corners of these huge blocks would compromise the hulls of barges, preventing their return, and forcing the men on them to jump into water over their heads.
When General Sherman had said that war is all hell, he was being something of a Pollyanna.
* * *
Contrary to what she had written on the photograph she’d given him, this gunner’s mom would not see him again.
I tried to think of the men he may have killed, in Hurricanes and Spitfires, but I had not seen their blood or smelled the vapors and traces of their deaths, and without that brutal evidence in my mind, I could not convict this mother’s son.
I reminded myself that I had not seen him grasping her photo as he collapsed, and had not seen his dying crewmate’s frantic efforts. I had only imagined these things.
I also wondered about the pilot. Surely he had realized, the moment he’d lost his gunner, that within minutes, his unprotected aircraft would be riddled with bullet holes. How quickly had he simply let loose his bombs, and looked for a place to safely bring down what remained of his crew?
I didn’t know how many bombs a Heinkel carried, and so couldn’t guess how much damage had been left undone because of this German gunner being killed. I looked again at the beach defenses, and wondered how many Germans might die there. And how many English lives would thus be spared.
When I had returned to High Salvington, what remained of the Heinkel bore no resemblance to an aircraft. It was only ragged scrap neatly piled on the lorry.