Dreams of a Traitor

He lay on the hilltop again-the one like an overturned kettle in France. Gunfire all around. Dead bodies, crying men... This was war. This was what he had fought to get to, what he had disobeyed his father to arrive at. Silhouettes of soldiers coursed across the bomb-lit night, and a face came near his. A man fell on him, his mouth open in the terror of dying. Jim pushed him aside, and looked at him. The man had no left leg. Jim said something to him-comfort maybe, he did not know what. Immediately his foot came alive with pain, where before had been only cold. He crawled away from the dying man. He was here to fight. Soldiers die every day-hadn't he written, before he came to France, many letters home to bereft families? Uneasily he crawled, and the man's face shoved into his thoughts. Jim realized he had known him. What was his name? He met several more bodies on his journey. Some of them talked to him. He did not talk back, but he could not help looking at them. They all looked stricken. Maybe they had not fought to come here. Jim's foot shouted louder than his sense of war, and he found himself on the outskirts of the firing, watching a man running like a victor up the hill. The man's uniform was German. His eyes screamed delight and murder at everything in his path. His rifle butt came down hard on the neck of a man whose face Jim could not see. Blond, though. Probably his name was... Other men fell. Their day had come. Suddenly blackness filled Jim's mind.

He woke, in his own bed in Nebraska. While he had been in England, his foot split by shrapnel, chasing nurses gleefully down the hall in his wheelchair, his machine gun squad had been erased. "Taken POW" were the words. What a bland phrase for all the pain of their families!

Jim had gone home, married, gone back to farming, and with his wife, Shirley, had raised five children. The men of his squad had never been heard of again, and where their lives should have been, only guesses remained. "Why was I spared?" he asked under cover of darkness. God had never answered his question. "Someday," vowed Jim, "someday I will know what happened to them."

Meanwhile, it was Christmas again, and the grandkids were coming. Yes, December 25th, 1944 had been his last day of action. His feet had been frozen in Belgium. He had come home on an American Red Cross ship, and resumed life.

Well, it was time to resume life yet again-the sun was getting up.

At 11:30 that morning, his children,

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