Twice the girl tried to speak but Skelton shook the voice out of her
quivering lips as a shadowy figure rose from the scrubby growth
behind the Crucifix. Then another rose, another, and many others
looming against the sky.
Macniff had begun to speak in German as they drew around him.
Presently Skelton broke in furiously:
"All right, then! That's the case. She sold us. She sold ME! But
she's German. And it's your business. But if you Germans will listen
to me you'll shove her against that pile of rocks and shoot her."
The girl had begun to cry now: "It's a lie! It's a lie!" she sobbed.
"If it was Recklow who talked to me I didn't know it. I thought he
was one of us, Harry! Don't go away! For God's sake, don't leave me
with those men--"
Macniff sneered as he slouched by her: "They're Germans, ain't they?
Wot are you squealin' for?"
"Harry! Harry!" she wailed--for her own countrymen had her now, held
her fast, thrust a dozen pig-eyed scowling visages close to hers,
muttering, making animal sounds at her.
Once she screamed. But Skelton seated himself on a rock, his back
toward her, his head buried in his hands.
To his dull, throbbing ears came now only the heavy trample of boots
among the rocks, guttural noises, a wrenching sound, then the
clatter of rolling stones.
Macniff, squatting beside him, muttered uneasily, speculating upon
what was being done behind him. But with German justice upon a
German he had no desire to interfere, and he had no stomach to
witness it, either.
"Why don't they shoot her and be done?" he murmured huskily. And,
later: "I can't make out what they're doing. Can you, Harry?"
But Skelton neither answered nor stirred. After a while he rose, not
looking around, and strode off down the eastern slope, his hands
pressed convulsively over his ears. Macniff slouched after him,
listening for the end.
They had gone a mile, perhaps, when Skelton's agonised voice burst
its barriers: "I couldn't--I couldn't stand it--to hear the shots!"
"I ain't heard no shots," remarked Macniff.
There had been no shots fired....
And now in the ghastly light of dawn the Germans on Mount Terrible
continued methodically the course of German justice.
Two of them, burly, huge-fisted, wrenched the Christ from the
weather-beaten Crucifix which they had uprooted from the summit of
its ancient cairn of rocks, and pulled out the rusty spike-like
nails.
The girl was already half dead when they laid her on the Crucifix
and nailed her there. After they had raised the cross and set it on
the summit she opened her eyes.
Several of the Germans laughed, and one of them threw pebbles at her
until she died.
Just before sunrise they went down to explore the neck of woods, but
found nobody. The Americans had been gone for a long time. So they
went back to the cross where the dead girl hung naked against the
sky and wrote on a bit of paper:
"Here hangs an enemy of Germany."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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