One Fight at a Time Read Online Free Page B

steady and uncompromising look in his blue eyes, lent a solid re-assurance to those around him, in the nervous dawn of June 6.
    The 21st battled every yard from Omaha Beach to the River Elbe.
    Grover began D Day as a private. He survived the Battle of the Bulge winter because he came from Tomah Wisconsin, which had the coldest sonovabitch winters on the planet. While his compatriots from South Carolina and Georgia shivered in soaked battledress and boots, he thumped on through the Ardennes snow, guiding the way like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.
    He got his first stripe after the 21st broke out of Bastogne. They gave him his second, after Baker Company led the charge over the Saar River, blowing up both German machine gun posts.
    While he was somewhere between Remagen Bridge and Betzdorf, slogging eastwards, his mother died of liver cancer. His brother Arnold, who was building Sherman tanks in Detroit, sent him a wire he never got. Div Coms was busy trying to direct the frenzied advance and lost it somehow. A subsequent letter reached him two weeks after the funeral. At that stage, there seemed no point in going home. So he stitched on his third chevron and kept moving.
    In the course of ten months, Grover morphed from scared rookie into experienced killer. Advance at whatever cost was the order, blasting onwards and trying not to die was the method, and home was a world away. He began to wonder who he had been before all this. What sort of person was the Ed Grover he had left behind in Tomah Wisconsin? He hoped to Christ he hadn’t been the person he was now. Because now, the only thing that mattered was this day in history and how many of the men in his company were still alive as it dawned.
    Finally, on the west bank of the Elbe, the soldiers of Baker Company stood still and silent, waiting for the end. Grover watched through binoculars, as soldiers of the Ukraine 1st Army gathered in a massive swarm across the river. Fleeing Germans, refugee Poles and Slavs were rounded up and bundled into makeshift compounds.
    Now, Europe belonged to the Allies, and the hammer and sickle flew over the Reichstag.
    *
    In the station Waiting Room, the tall man finished reading his newspaper, folded it and offered it to Zoe. She read the front page headline. BRITAIN’S WOMEN ENJOY BEING HOME - MAKERS AGAIN . This was the conclusion arrived at, following a survey conducted by the recently created Home Plans for Britain Committee – a group of prominent civil servants, set up to review how Britain was coping, five years on. Marvellously well apparently. Zoe wondered how comprehensive that survey had been. Which, in turn, led to considering how life had moved on in the West Country.
    The war effort in Swindon’s railway yards had been immense. Millions of fighter cannon shells, thousands of bombs, field generators, bailey bridges and landing craft. Most of them built by women who had learned overnight how to be fitters and riveters. Now, the men had returned from Europe to take their old jobs back. The women who had kept Britain in the war and made a huge contribution to the winning of it, were once again housewives and home makers. But almost five years on, sweets and chocolate, tea, sugar, eggs, tinned fruit, jam, cheese, soap and petrol were still on ration. Even if the new age of austerity housewife could make three pounds ten shillings a week housekeeping seem like a fortune, she still struggled to put a decent family meal on the table.
    The tannoy crackled into life. Announced that the 9.05 to Bristol Temple Meads was approaching platform 2. Bodies spilled out of the Waiting Room.
    Zoe walked towards the front of the train. Ahead of her, a soldier rose from the bench in the shelter, crossed the platform and opened the rear door of the front carriage. He saw her approaching, held the door open and waved her into the carriage ahead of him. She nodded her thanks. He climbed in behind her and closed the door.
    The compartments had spare