Free Black Radishes by Susan Lynn Meyer Page A

walls and along the sides of the road. The pounding came closer, and then Gustave heard hooves. A man riding a glossy black horse appeared at the bottom of the hill. Gustave stared, but what he saw didn’t change. The man had a rifle slung over his shoulder, and he was wearing a German uniform.
    The horse tossed its head and started up the hill. More soldiers straddling muscular horses followed. The hooves clopped up the road, right in front of Gustave’s house. Behind the men on horseback came marching German soldiers, wave after wave of them, as if they would keep on coming forever. Gustave watched the shiny black boots. Eighty-two, eighty-four, eighty-six, eighty-eight, he counted feverishly. If he could only count fast enough, he thought dazedly, he would know how many there were. Ninety, ninety-two, ninety-four, ninety-six. But the boots, rising up and smashing down, swam in front of him, and he lost count. He dragged his eyes away and looked up. Greenish gray uniforms, steel helmets, rifles. Faces like stone. The soldiers looked straight ahead as they marched south, turned the corner, and disappeared out of sight. They seemed to know exactly where they were going. They moved like machines, not men.
    Some of the watching French men and women wept silently, tears running down their faces. Gustave could hear his heart pounding, more loudly than the thunderous marching boots. He felt frozen to the ground, unable to move or even to turn his eyes away from the soldiers. German soldiers were marching through the streets of France, his country, his native land. Marching right through this tiny country village, this little, out-of-the-way place, where his family had come to be safe. It was like a nightmare. It couldn’t be real. But it was.
    A few houses away, on the other side of the road, two huge, wolflike dogs leapt at the gate from inside, snarling and growling. Their owner, Monsieur Grégoire, leaned on the wall across the road, his face twisted with grief. Let them out, Gustave thought despairingly. Let out the chiens méchants !
    But of course Monsieur Grégoire wouldn’t do that. Even if those dogs, with their fierce teeth, managed to hurt a few soldiers, the other Germans would just take their rifles down off their shoulders and shoot them. They would probably shoot Monsieur Grégoire too. The waves of Germans marched up the road, as the French people stood watching, and, over and over again, the dogs hurled themselves uselessly against the gate.
    When the first tank rumbled up the road, Gustave couldn’t watch anymore. There were too many soldiers. Too many tanks. He ran away from the road and, on his hands and knees, pushed his way under the low branches, into the bushes behind the garage. He sat there, curled up in the tight space, for a long time, trying to stop shaking. When he crawled out, all the tanks seemed to have rumbled by, but he could hear more feet marching.
    He scrambled up the ladder to the loft and looked around. The three spears still leaned against the wall, at the ready. He flushed. They didn’t look like spears anymore, just like stupid sharpened sticks. Dumb toys. And he was all by himself. Marcel and Jean-Paul weren’t there. Maybe they never would be. What did he think he needed three sharpened sticks for? He seized the spears angrily and cracked them over his knee, one after the other, until all that was left of them was a mess of splintered wood.
    The sound of the marching German boots gradually faded away into the distance, going deeper and deeper into France.

11

    “A large part of our territory will be occupied on a temporary basis,” said an unfamiliar voice on the radio. It was Maréchal Pétain, who had just been appointed the new leader of France.
    “Armistice!” Papa shouted back at the radio when the speech was over. “That’s what you call an armistice! Appalling.”
    “What does it mean?” Gustave jumped to his feet and grabbed Papa’s arm. “What’s