A/N: This one's short, but heavy.


Chapter Fifty-Nine


It didn't take long for them to set off towards the other bridges. Alice remained in Eindhoven, meeting with members of the Resistance and trying to gather what intelligence information she could from them. By nightfall, Easy returned and took up lodgings around the outskirts of town. Absolutely exhausted from a day of paper pushing and interviews, Alice walked in the dark from the house she'd done her work in to wherever Easy had set up for the night.

She stood outside the city. The sky still hadn't cleared, so instead of stars and the full moon that they should've seen, only a blanket of black was visible. Behind her she could still hear the parties being thrown by the liberated Dutch. Alice closed her eyes. Letting her head fall back a bit, she tried to relax.

A lot had come to light that day, more than she'd expected. The Resistance happily shared their information with her. They had German troop movements, code names of contacts in other cities, records of eliminated targets both human and structural. It hadn't taken long to find out that their primary method of resistance had been smuggling and hiding their Jewish brothers and sisters.

Many of the people she interviewed for information had done just that. They all knew about the Jewish work camps; men and women and children taken away to build things for the Nazi cause. None of them knew where the camps were, though, or how many and when they'd been built. A loosely organized underground network had been built to smuggle the Jews of Holland to Amsterdam and other port cities, and from there, out of German occupied Europe.

One estimate she heard placed the number of Jews who had gone missing near a hundred thousand, but the total number could've been far greater since the start of the war. As Alice stood outside the city, darkness around her, she tried to breathe. Ignore the parties, ignore the brash Americans, ignore the rowdy liberated Dutch.

For a while she just stood there. Alice didn't move, didn't talk. She just breathed. But soon enough, Johnny Martin's voice from her left distracted her.

"Second Platoon's been looking for you," he said. Moving to stand next to her, he glanced at her face. When she didn't respond he just shrugged. "So's George. Non-stop."

Alice cracked a small smile. "Yeah, I bet." But Alice didn't move to follow him. She stood looking off into the darkness of Holland. "Good work, securing the bridges."

"Find out anything useful while you were stuck here?"

"Some."

Johnny nodded. "Well, some of us grabbed a cleaned out barn along the other side of town. I don't beg, but if I did, I would beg you to come so Bill, George, and the rest of Second would shut up about where you are."

She scoffed, and then shook her head. "Fine, fine. I get the picture."

Alice followed Johnny around the edge of town. They walked in silence. When the farmhouse came into view, she paused for a moment. Such a picturesque little barn… When they reached it, George, Skip, and Penkala sat outside smoking. At their approach, all three of them shouted.

"You found her!" George grinned. Standing up, he waited for them, hands on his hips.

Johnny just shook his head. "It was the only fucking way to get sleep around here."

Pushing past them, he went inside. Alice stood with her arms crossed. George, Skip, and Penkala started telling her all about their missions since she'd left them that mid morning. At first she listened, but soon Alice tuned it out.

They went inside. As she nodded along absentmindedly, she took up a vacant spot along the wall and plopped down. To the far side she saw a lot of Third and First lounging about, some playing cards, other digging into food that looked decidedly nonmilitary. Second Platoon lay or sat scattered around as well. She saw Joe and Bill chatting with Lipton in the back far corner. Skinny, Alley, and Liebgott had started a card game. Soon enough, Alice tried to tune everything else out as well.

As the three men kept going, she sighed. Finally she turned to George in particular. "I'm going to bed."

Skip and Alex looked barely phased, wishing her goodnight and moving off to a different part of the barn. Malarkey, Grant, and Talbert sat around in another corner so they joined them. But George stopped talking and watched her. It took a moment for her to notice.

"You good?" he asked. A cigarette dangled from his lips as he asked. George shifted himself next to her against the wall. "Cause you been acting weird the last week or so."

She couldn't even get angry at the prodding. She'd been angry enough at Nixon. Now she just wanted it all to disappear, to go back to the blissful moments before she'd gotten the letters from Elsa or found out about the stupid Jewish work camps. Fighting in Normandy had been fighting for her home, fresh in her mind. Fighting in the Netherlands just felt exhausting.

"Now I know you ain't good," George said. "You didn't even yell at me for asking."

"I'm just tired," she said. But the excuse sounded hollow even to her own ears. With a sigh, she let her head rest against the wood slat wall of the barn. Alice closed her eyes. "How'd you do today?"

George shook his head. "We did fine. Dog and Fox helped us secure the targets. But don't change the subject."

"I got some bad news last week related to family I had in Arnhem. That combined with all the shit that happened today, I'm just exhausted." Alice sighed. Her eyes closed. She felt tears springing to the surface. The memories of the Resistance groups' information, the faces of the screaming tortured women, the letters of Elsa all felt like too much. "I'm not very good company right now, I suppose."

George snorted in amusement. "You're better company than those two jokers," he argued. "I'd rather have someone next to me who looks pretty even dirty in fatigues than those ugly mugs."

Alice couldn't stop her smile. She shook her head and opened her eyes again. "Should've led with that pick up line two years ago, George."

It was his turn to laugh. "Eh I don't think it would've worked."

She tried to relax more. Using George as physical support as much as moral, she leaned against him. George offered her a cigarette, but she declined. "I think I'd fall asleep with it in my mouth. You just keep smoking and I'll breath yours in."

"Sounds good to me."

Closing her eyes, she did just that. Before long she started using George's shoulder as a bit of a pillow, the nicotine from his cigarette giving her some relief. The noise began to die down around them. By 0100, lights were turned off. Alice drifted off even before then.

By 0700 the next morning, the three platoons had gathered with the British armored division. Alice road near the first tank next to Johnny and his squad. Despite being assigned to Second Platoon, old habits died hard, and she soon found herself in First's company.

The tanks rolled on, their tracks making all sorts of noise on the gravel road in addition to the loud gears. Few people even tried to speak. It took an hour to get past Nuenen. After that, the next town would be Helmond, their target.

Murmurs and gestures down the road from the tanks drew Alice's attention. When she caught sight of what had the men's attention, her heart broke. A woman holding a young baby, head shaved and skin bruised, watched them pass. It only took her a few seconds before she had slid past Johnny and Hoobler off the tank and to the ground.

Alice immediately jogged down the road. When she reached the woman, they looked at each other for a moment. Her eyes were red from crying, her fingernails bloody. The infant at her chest was young, no more than a year old. He had dark hair to match what was left of his mother's own shaved head.

She grabbed the woman in a hug. Her forehead touched the woman's own, and at the contact, the woman broke down again. Her sobs wrecked through her body where she stood half dressed along the road. Alice told her it would be okay, trying to speak in Dutch as best she could. Alice knew the men would be watching. She used her body to block the woman's own.

Alice stayed there as the tanks passed. If it meant walking along the back, then she would walk along the back to preserve what little dignity the young mother had left. The woman didn't respond to Alice's murmured words of comfort but before long both she and her young child stopped crying. But Alice didn't.

"Thank you." The woman murmured the words quietly, through sobs. She raised her gaze to meet Alice's. "They will want you to follow."

"I know." Alice wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. She placed it on the young boy's head. "Don't let them break you. We all do bad things to survive. The men here will never understand what that means for us."

The woman's face scrunched up again as she tried not to cry. She looked down at the boy in her arms. Then she nodded. "Go. Free us."

Alice nodded. She backed away from the woman, watching her carefully. When the woman offered her a small smile, Alice turned away. It didn't surprise her to find the jeep that Dick, Harry, and Nixon had taken had stopped while the tanks kept going. Alice walked up to them. She didn't speak as she hoisted herself into the back with Harry. It didn't escape her that all three of them looked her way. But she refused to respond, and soon enough the jeep moved on to follow the tank caravan.

Another hour passed in silence. Alice ignored the blatantly obvious concern from the men in her jeep. If and when she decided to talk to them, it would be on her terms. A deep isolation had welled up in her. No matter how much the men would say they could understand what it would be like to be a woman in occupied territory, they didn't. They couldn't. And some part of her knew she'd been one decision away from being in the same boat as the nameless woman on the side of the road.

Nameless. Alice almost looked back. She hadn't gotten her name. Instead the woman and her child would be yet another statistic. A nameless statistic.