Chapter 12
The Army does and doesn’t. They receive word on D+2 that Colonel Phillips will be en route to them from New York, and they’re to stay put and await further instruction. So they wait, while the front lines roll forward. Dugan finishes a set of socks for each man in their unit, and two for Steve. A whole bundle of letters from home arrives on a resupply ship, and Steve surrenders seven illustrations from his sketchbook to send back to Bucky’s sisters. Cherbourg is liberated.
They stay busy; the war is still going on, even as they twiddle their thumbs in Normandy. Used to carrying secrets, they work with their Resistance contacts to ferret out nests of collaborators, and to carry messages between towns. Caen is liberated. The Allies roll on towards Paris, and west towards the Siegfried line.
Morita comes to Steve early one morning, while gray ghosts of mist blend with faraway smoke. Contrails in the sky burn away beneath the rising sun. Its heat has also begun to loosen the obdurate knot of phlegm in his throat, but he still clears it while waiting for Morita to speak.
“We’re to make our way to Chartres by noon. The RAF plans to hit them at sixteen hundred hours.”
Steve informs the others of their mission, which is to warn the town of their impending destruction. He explains the rest of what they know: “Colonel Griffith has done what we couldn’t do in Italy and figured out Chartres isn’t an observation post for the Germans. So we get to go and warn them they’re going to get hit, and help with the evacuation.”
They fear at first that the German-controlled town will put up a fight but it turns out the leadership has already fled, moved by rumors of Captain America.
The French mayor of Chartres takes the news of the bombing with equanimity, presented in awkward French by Captain America holding his cowl apologetically in one hand. Steve has come to respect the French for their silent acceptance of the fire rained down on their country. Razed countryside that they must feel as strongly as if the fields were a part of themselves. He can see Dernier brace himself sometimes, taking deep draughts of air as if preparing for bodily pain, when the planes above gracefully let go their bombs.
There’s a huge and ancient cathedral at Chartres with Gothic spires and a greened copper roof that Bucky informs him is the exact color of the Statue of Liberty. “Which was French,” Dernier adds. It has windows that appear like narrowed eyes from afar. Inside they are stained glass that filter light through in colors Steve can only guess at, though he had seen shades of a particular vivid blue among them. Gabe stares in awe and asks questions of the workmen who scramble up tall ladders to remove the windows from their metal settings. The blue, he informs Steve, is called bleu de Saint-Denis. No one knows how the original artists created the color. The Commandos help townspeople pack the windows in crates of straw and move them down to the Church basement. It feels like carrying sarcophagi for entombment.
The Chartres cathedral, blinded of its windows, stands ready for the oncoming bombs. They move through the evacuated town. Steve sees Bucky sling an arm around Morita when they pass a discarded toy car, a wooden contraption, and a wagon that holds someone’s phonograph apparently deemed too heavy for removal. The two of them talk for a moment and then wheel the phonograph back into the lee of the nearest house, hopefully shaded from bombs. They jog to catch up with the rest of them and then they leave Chartres behind. Silent phonograph and eyeless church and the hidden bleu de Saint-Denis.
That’s a successful mission.
-
There are other missions, other towns. A little village near Caen, notable only for not having been blown to hell and back during the leadup to Overlord. They go with an escort of soldiers, all volunteers, all smiles. The escort sits in the shade while Captain America, Dugan, Gabe, Monty, and Dernier climb up on top of a tank (a real one has been spared for the purpose), and are filmed driving through the narrow cobblestone streets. Their volunteer guard is eager to be chosen as extras in the film, which the director tells Steve will be distributed in full through the Navy’s library, and clips shown in the newsreels for the good folks back home. The title will be Captain America and his Howling Commandos, after the sound their weapons made on D-Day.
As soon as they’d arrived, Jim and Steve found a nice patch of grass and mostly intact wall to lean against, neither of them expecting to be asked up onto the tank. Gabe has been given a spot right next to Captain America, as the Germans lately have been using the treatment of Negroes in America as part of their own propaganda. Dugan is on Bucky’s right, beaming broadly beneath his mustache.
French citizens line up, and when signaled throw flowers at Captain America. The first time Bucky smiles and catches one. The second and third takes he sits unsmiling, his jaw set square and tight. Dernier throws kisses to the crowd. Monty waves like his queen, also unsmiling.
“What’re you drawing?” Jim asks, his eyes closed.
“We might as well be with the USO show,” Steve mutters, his neck bent over his sketchpad. He brushes eraser shavings off the paper, and they’re lost among the grass. “Kissing babies. Selling bonds.”
Yesterday, a train had left Paris carrying over two thousand political prisoners, including American airmen captured during the Overlord invasion. No one was sure where they had been sent. Paris was striking against their occupiers. Thirty miles south from the little village Captain America was pretending to liberate, German troops were streaming east through Falaise, trying to outrun an Allied pincer trip. Tens of thousands of Germans were reported killed already, littering a flattened countryside with corpses.
Jim cracks one eye open, casts it sideways towards Steve. “You wanna be on the front instead?” he asks.
“I want the war to end,” Steve says, and lets his head thump back against the stone. “Not to be relegated to the side show again. We’re so close to ending all of this - we should be doing more than saving church windows.”
Jim opens his other eye and stares outward with silent discontent. They watch the director step forward to confer with the ‘actors’ on the tank. After a moment Gabe steps down, and they set up the shot again. The tank rolls over the rough cobblestones. The villagers throw flowers to their liberators.
“Thought this was the ‘most important battlefield of all’,” Jim says.
“When it was fake,” Steve says. “These men believe Captain America’s real.”
Jim snorts. “Don’t you?”
When Steve doesn’t say anything to that, he leans over and digs a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket. The smell of the match strike is sour over the sweet smell of grass and old stone.
They let Bucky off the tank while they set up the next shot, and he comes over to put Jim and Steve’s shady wall physically between him and their escorts, several of whom have told the camera crew they signed up after seeing Captain America’s posters around their neighborhood. He’ll Never Quit! And Neither Shall We! And then they’d mugged the look of their favorite, pointing sternly at an invisible, insufficiently patriotic audience.
“So how’s being a movie star?” Jim asks, tipping his chin back to look up at Bucky, whose elbows are braced on the wall between them.
“I didn’t like it at first,” he says, shrugging.
“How about now?” Steve asks.
“I’m still on first,” Bucky replies, and takes a deep draught from his canteen, wiping water off his mouth with the back of one gloved hand.
Steve laughs. He turns his notepad so Bucky can see: a great shaggy bear, his fur poking out like straw from under Captain America’s helmet, bunched lumpily into the costume, one paw up in a crisp salute. The bear is smoking a cigarette.
Bucky snorts - a beautiful, undignified sound. He brings a gloved hand down to thread into Steve’s hair, give him a rough little shake. He smooths Steve’s hair afterwards, still staring down at the bear. “A beser zelner vi mir,” he says, and Jim says, “Bless you.”
-
Colonel Phillips arrives with a complete absence of fanfare, as usual. Steve is on his way to the mess with Dugan when a private comes up and requests Captain Rogers’ presence. He addresses this to Dugan, as if he’s blind to the number of bars on each of their uniforms.
Phillips has commandeered someone else’s tent. When Steve pushes the heavy flap aside he’s staring fixedly down at a map of the border between northern France and Germany, with a little train of markers leading up through Belgium and the Netherlands - almost, but not quite paralleling the heavy red line of German defence. “At ease, Rogers,” Phillips says, but then he smiles. They hadn’t gotten along at first; the man had been issued, not born, and though he’d been enthusiastic about combat deception as a theory, he was used to commanding, as he’d put it, ‘real soldiers.’ But Phillips had come around eventually.
They shake, and Phillips claps a heavy hand on Steve’s shoulder.
“We’re bypassing the Seigfried line?” Steve asks, nodding his chin at the map.
“That’s the plan,” Phillips says, “up and over the garden wall. Should have the whole thing buttoned up by Christmas.”
“I remember that from ‘42,” Steve says, and adds, “Sir.”
“I remember that smart mouth on you,” Phillips says, and Steve bounces a little on his toes, eager. But he’s not there to put Steve’s unit on their next assignment, or rather, he is: he’s there to send them home.
For a moment Steve thinks that Phillips is joking. The silence stretches, and Steve’s nervous smile, only half there to begin with, drops off his face. “Sir,” he says, “you gotta be kidding me.”
“Is this the face of a man who would kid you?” Phillips asks. He sits down behind the desk, looking balefully at the little signs of personality littered across it: a woman’s photograph, paperwork that’s been doodled upon. “Your unit’s been reassigned,” he says. “You’re going to Washington to shake hands and pose for nice pictures. Well, Barnes’ll be posing, anyway. Can’t imagine you’d look as friendly to the camera.”
“We could be of use in the Netherlands,” Steve protests, “for - for falsifying landings of the paratroopers, or - Captain Fox’s unit moved out directly after the landings, to obscure troop movements for the 9th Infantry. My men could join up with another deception unit at the front, and -”
“Your men,” Phillips says, “could use some rest. How about a few weeks in Paris before you ship home? I hear it’s nice this time of year.”
“We’re fine,” Steve says. “We’re well-rested.”
Philips quirks an eyebrow. “I’m sure you are,” he says. He leans back in his chair. “Took me some time go through all of your mission reports, you know. Almost as long as it took my team back at the SSR to write up suitable fictions to submit on Captain America’s behalf. A few times we actually had to tone down the heroics to make it more believable.” He shakes his head. “Participating in a full scale invasion - against orders, yes I did hear all about that, no I do not want your excuses - after months of performing commando raids in hostile territory -”
“So you’re approving all of my promotion requests?” Steve asks, mulish.
The other eyebrow goes up, and Phillips says, measured, “Point is, your unit has done their part. Getting our feet on the continent was always going to be the hardest part, and now that we’ve done it, the rest is a job for infantry. The war is over, Rogers.”
“All due respect, I don’t believe it is,” Steve says, through his teeth. Outside the tent, it’s started raining again. The air tastes thick and muddy with it. It’s quiet, in the camp; all of the soldiers left a long time ago, and what’s left over are people busy with phone calls and telegraphy, directing the passage of men arriving from England and into the European continent, and then back out again on stretchers or in bags.
Phillips is watching Steve closely, his hands steepled in front of his chin. “This isn’t a punishment,” he says. “Your unit has performed above and beyond the expectations placed upon it. Your unredacted reports have been reviewed by General Eisenhower himself. The reassignment is his decision, and where he feels Captain America would be most useful.”
Steve is silent. Phillips holds his gaze, solemn and shadowed in the dim tent. He says, “Cap’s a hero to the American public. Bond sales take a ten percent bump in every state the USO show visits. Enlistment takes a jump too. The War Activities Committee is coordinating with RKO for a fourth full length picture. He’s a success on all fronts, Rogers. The Germans have been throwing thousands of Reichsmarks at anyone who thinks they can figure out how to engineer Erskine’s serum. Even the Russians want their own super soldier; they made one hell of an offer to Stark about it. Surprised he didn’t accept, actually.”
“Stark doesn’t need the money,” Steve says, and Phillips shrugs.
“Or he knows it’s impossible, and doesn’t want the black mark on his record,” he says, and sighs. “More’s the pity, we were hoping he could pick up where Erskine left off.”
“I think this is a mistake,” Steve says.
“I know you do,” Phillips says, but softly, soft enough that Steve looks up from where he’s been studying the dirty tips of his too-big galoshes, the tips stuffed full with torn up Army guidebooks. “Think big picture, Rogers. I know you’ve got it in you. Think about every politician who wants to get a photo of themselves shaking Cap’s hand, authorizing new funds for the war effort first. We’ve got all the warm bodies we could want; what we need is gasoline, and bullets, and new coats and boots for the winter. Same thing the Germans need, and if we get there first we can starve them out. This is what winning a war looks like, Rogers.”
That cold calculation again, which feels as cold as the wind when Steve steps out of Phillips’ tent, his galoshes sticking immediately in the thick mud. He curses a bit, and then bites his tongue, hard enough to sting: he doesn’t want to give Phillips the satisfaction. He’d made himself bleed this way, a couple times. The last time it happened, Bucky’d made him stick his tongue out as far as he could to get a look at it and said, “Maybe it’d better if you just bit the damn thing off.”
There, waiting for Steve, is Bucky himself: head bowed over his cigarette, mouth open and soft. A thinking look, he used to call it, laughing when Steve called him names over that slacked-jawed expression. He smiles when he sees Steve, his whole face wrinkling up with it. “You look like a little thundercloud,” he says.
“That’s funny,” Steve says. “You oughta take that show on the road.”
They walk together away from the cluster of command tents. Bucky matches Steve’s pace easily, unhurriedly. Unmindful of the bit of rain that’s falling on their shoulders. “I can’t figure it,” Bucky says, after a while.
“Figure what?”
“Whether I’m gonna like what’s got your panties up in a knot,” Bucky answers, and Steve reaches up and boxes his ear. He can hardly outrun Bucky, but he makes it a few furious steps before one of Bucky’s long arms comes and hauls him back close. His fingers are cold on the back of Steve’s neck, threaded into Steve’s collar. Steve’s hands stay fisted at his sides, and after a moment Bucky releases him, though he doesn’t step away. He stays right where he is, the barest bit of heat reaching through the layers of Steve’s uniform.
He studies Steve’s face closely, and then says, “They’re sending us home.” He says it softly, disbelieving, and then again when Steve doesn’t say anything: “They’re sending us home?”
Steve’s throat is aching. Damn Bucky, anyway; he’d always been the smart one, out of the two of them. “You’re going to Wichita after all - or Washington, at least,” Steve says, and adds, spitefully, “The one in Maryland. That’s south of Jersey.”
Bucky rubs a hand over his mouth and looks away, blinking fast. “I know,” Steve says. “I told Phillips it was a mistake. We should be going to Germany.”
Bucky is silent for a long time. “Steve,” he says. “Didn’t we do enough?”
“I thought we did,” Steve says.
Bucky’s jaw tightens. There’s rain in his hair and in the shadowy beginnings of a beard on his face. For a moment he gropes for the words, one hand fisting in his own hair while Steve looks up at him. His neck is starting to ache, from the angle. “Would it be so awful for you to just live through this thing?” Bucky says, at last.
It’s the tone more than anything else that gives Steve pause, thick with real anger. “Uh,” Steve says, blinking at him stupidly, “I never thought about it.”
“I know you haven’t,” Bucky says. “You’re not gonna be satisfied until you get all of us killed.”
“I’m not trying to get anyone killed,” Steve says. “I’m not - Bucky, come on, this isn’t - Captain America’s worth more than this, than being stuck in some, some politician’s -” He flounders, but he can’t find the right words among all the revulsion he feels at the sheer, horrible waste of it all.
“Whatever you say, Cap,” Bucky says, and shakes his head. “Well, I’ll go tell the guys the bad news. I’m sure they’ll be as busted up over it as you are. You can start a letter writing campaign to protest the injustice.”
“Bucky, come on,” Steve says, but Bucky moves away, faster than Steve can follow.
“I thought about it,” he calls over his shoulder. “I thought about it plenty.”