The Undaunted

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

**Author's Note: This chapter contains some scenes and descriptions which may be disturbing.**

As Jenny drove, she thought about stories and rumors she had heard but had been too scared to pursue. Until now. So, she didn't go as far as Ardennes. Instead, almost hating herself for doing it because how could she betray the men she had become friends with, but knowing that if she didn't, she was betraying all of the women instead. She stopped near a small cottage on the outskirts of the village.

Not many women would speak to her once her questions changed from the general to the specific. But one woman, Renee, whose husband was a prisoner of war in Germany and whose father had been killed by the Germans for helping downed Allied pilots evade capture, asked Jenny to dine with her and her mother.

Jenny offered the two women each a cigarette, and as the trio sat there smoking, Renee poured out her sorry story. 

"We always gave our food and our cows and our chickens to the soldiers," she said, drawing deeply on the Lucky Strike Jenny had given her, ignoring the meager food on the table. "But then there were no more chickens or cows to give, and the vegetables in the garden were too small. Unsatisfactory. My father had a wounded British pilot hiding in the cellar. My mother and I took turns nursing him. Then the Germans came. Perhaps we should have given them the pilot. But then they would have taken my father too, so..."

Renee shrugged, stood up and walked over to kiss the top of her mother's head.

"They told us to choose," she said quietly. "Me, or my mother. So, I went with them to the bedroom. There were four men. The...the f-fifth was given the job of keeping my mother and father in the kitchen while..." She stopped and studiously avoided Jenny's eyes, the shame apparent in the droop of her shoulders.

Jenny's pen moved over her paper. She did not look up as Renee spoke because she sensed the woman's shame, that she did not want Jenny's eyes on her while she talked. Jenny wanted to shout, You aren't the one who should be ashamed! But Renee hadn't finished yet.

"When the last one was nearly done, the others left the room. They came back with my mother. And they made me watch."

Jenny's pen stopped moving and fell limp to the notebook in which she was writing, her eyes burning with useless tears. 

"The next day, they returned," Renee said in a sad, tired voice. "My mother hadn't been able to leave her bed since they had gone. My father was on the floor by the bed crying. The Krauts took the pilot and my father out back and shot them." She finally turned around and looked Jenny in the eye, tears streaming down her face. "It had all been for nothing."

***

It had all been for nothing.

The words rang in Jenny's head as she drove back to the chateau. Because Renee had said one last terrible thing to Jenny before she left.

"A couple of weeks ago, some American soldiers were here. This time, I just took off my dress. It hurts less when you don't struggle."

Jenny new goddamn well nobody would publish it if she wrote it into a story. Nobody wanted to read about American soldiers raping the women of a country that had been under German rule for years, behaving as everyone imagined the Germans did. Nobody wanted to see what lay beneath the resignation on Renee's face and the silence of her mother's mouth, which Jenny had captured in a photograph of the two of them, sitting at the table before too-thin slices of bread, gripping their cigarettes as if their lives depended upon it.

What to do? The question haunted Jenny on the long, dark road back to the chateau as she used every bit of strength and judgment to make her way without a navigator, praying there would be no Germans on the road, no mines, no shells, no reason to have to leap out of the jeep and hide in a ditch alone. She reached the chateau late, tired, filthy, every muscle aching and crying out in pain.