The girls looked puzzled, but the teacher spoke to them in German and they nodded and started toward Arnouthbourg. He and Vaccaro walked on with the schoolteacher. They soon came to a bend in the road, presided over by a neatly whitewashed house.

He spotted movement in one of the windows. A rifle appeared in an open window upstairs.

“Sniper!” he shouted.

Vaccaro scrambled for cover, diving into some bushes at the side of the road.

Cole raised his own rifle and would have fired, but the teacher stepped in front of him, shielding him. Facing the house, she raised her arms and shouted in German. Cole couldn’t understand her, but she sounded almost hysterical. She kept herself in front of Cole, preventing whoever was in the house from shooting.

“Aw, hell.” Cole put down his rifle and pulled out a white handkerchief.

“Cole, what the hell are you doing?” Vaccaro shouted from the side of the road.

“Something goddamn stupid, that’s what,” he replied.

Holding the white handkerchief high, he moved forward alongside the schoolteacher.

“You reckon they’ll shoot me?” he asked her.

The teacher stepped closer to Cole and hooked her arm through his so that they were walking hip to hip. “Not if I can help it.”

The door of the white house was locked, but the teacher pounded on it and shouted in German. Cole couldn’t understand the words, but it was unmistakably the stern tone of a schoolmarm. He heard movement inside, and put his hand on the pistol. Wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good if those German schoolboys shot through the door.

He heard some arguing on the other side of the locked door, but finally the door opened. Four boys stood just inside, crowded into the doorway. One boy had an old hunting rifle that had a stock wrapped with twine, and a second boy held a rusty shotgun. The third kid didn’t have a weapon and seemed to be there for moral support. The fourth boy held a standard issue Mauser K98 military rifle. The sight of it made Cole’s spine tingle. Given half a chance, the fourth kid wouldn’t have had any trouble picking off American GIs passing on the road.

The teacher seemed to be scolding the boys. When she finished, she turned to Cole expectantly. “What should they do now?”

“Tell them to put their guns down on the floor, miss. Tell them there ain’t no shame in it. The war is over. It ain’t their fault. And one of you has got a sister back in town who is awfully worried about you.”

The boy holding the Mauser started crying. Cole kept one hand on his pistol until, one by one, the boys put down their guns and filed out of the house. Cole didn’t realize until then that he had been holding his breath. The schoolteacher herded her students back toward town like a mother hen, looking back over her shoulder to give Cole a grateful nod.

Cole gathered up the weapons and unloaded them. The ancient shotgun didn’t even lock up tight—it likely would have blinded whoever had fired it. He pulled the bolts from the rifles and hurled them into the weeds. Then he tossed the ammunition in another direction. One by one, he took the rifles by their muzzles and swung them as far into the surrounding fields as he could.

Vaccaro walked up. He was holding the rifle that Cole had left on the road. “That’s it? We just let them go?”

“You got a better idea?” Cole grunted as he hurled the shotgun into some bushes. “Maybe you want to line ’em up and shoot these kids?”

“I guess not.” Vaccaro handed Cole his rifle. He looked shaken. “Those kids could have killed us both. I can’t believe you walked right up to that house and got them to surrender. Cole, you are one crazy son of a bitch. It’s not like I haven’t said that before.”

“Yep, but that’s the first time today. I reckon I must be getting worried about living until the war’s over.”

CHAPTER 5

With the victory at Seelow Heights, won by grinding thousands of Russians to a bloody pulp until the Germans were simply overwhelmed, all roads were now leading to Berlin.

On one of these roads, a very drunken Yegor Barkov was riding in the back of a Studebaker truck emblazoned with a Soviet star. He had a bottle of liquor in one hand and his prized Mosin-Nagant rifle with its telescopic sight in the other. Balanced in the bed of the slow-moving truck, he looked like he was posing for a photograph.

The advance toward Berlin resembled a victory parade after so many months upon months of slogging through snow and mud and blood. The truck slowed yet more to move around a trio of German women who struggled to push a wheelbarrow piled high with their possessions. The women appeared hunched and beaten, not even bothering to look up. These damn Germans, he thought. They deserved this defeat. Now they were reaping what they had sown.

Barkov took one last swig of alcohol and hurled the empty bottle at the women. The bottle struck one of them in the head with such force that it knocked her down. Barkov laughed. He’d always had good aim.