Free The Rest is Silence (Billy Boyle World War II Mystery) by James R. Benn

unsecured rear canvas cover flapping in the breeze. I caught a glimpse of limbs jutting out at odd angles from the darkness of the truck bed. A truck full of dead soldiers. As soon as we came to a side road, Kaz took it.
    “You trade in ours for a newer model?” I said as Kaz floored it and headed inland, away from the concentration of men and vehicles, the quick and the dead.
    “It was Tom who pinched it,” Kaz said. “How are you feeling?”
    “Still a little stunned,” I said. “Since when do constables steal automobiles?”
    “As it’s an American military vehicle,” Quick said, “I am participating in Lend-Lease, not stealing. Your Colonel Harding thought it was an ingenious rationale.”
    “It helped that the major we borrowed it from was a fool,” Kaz said.
    “How so?” I asked from my perch in the rear.
    “He cursed the Royal Navy for the shelling. Called the captain of the Hawkins a British son of a bitch.”
    “General Eisenhower doesn’t mind officers calling each other sons of bitches,” I explained to Tom. “But he hates it when they say someone is an American or a British son of a bitch. Ike is all about Allied unity.”
    “Colonel Harding was too busy to discipline the major, but I knew he was furious with him. So he turned a blind eye to our enterprise,” Kaz said.
    “Well, it worked out well for us,” Quick said. “Otherwise we’d still be waiting for a lift. It seems every other vehicle was pressed into service to deliver the wounded to hospital and the dead to wherever they’ll be buried.”
    “How many?” I asked.
    “We don’t know,” Kaz said. “Harding did the count of dead and wounded himself and wouldn’t say. He threatened everyone within earshot with a court-martial if they spoke of the incident.”
    “It’s not like Harding to worry about public relations,” I said.
    “I think it is more than that,” Kaz said. “There’s a secret he’s not sharing with us.”
    “Need to know,” I said, a shopworn phrase by now.
    “And we do not need to know,” Kaz said. There was nothing much left to say. We left the deserted South Hams and drove through villages and past fields alive with people, animals, and crops; everyday scenes that seemed to mock the devastation we’d left behind. Bodies and burnt houses, only a few miles from these peaceful hamlets where life continued much as before on this fine spring day. I wanted all these people to understand the sacrifice their neighbors had made, to know about the American GIs suffering in hospitals, and the dead tossed in trucks for a secret burial. Maybe they bore their own burdens of loss, or maybe they were oblivious to the world carrying on around them. It didn’t matter. Deep down, I knew I simply didn’t want to carry this secret locked up inside me. But orders were orders, as went the insistent logic of the army.
    “Tom, how’d you miss getting hit by those shells?” I asked. “I seem to recall you were pretty exposed.”
    “I saw they were headed in our direction and ran,” he said. “The force of the blast bowled me over, but the shrapnel missed me, thank God. After all the German ack-ack we flew through, I’d hate to go for a Burton courtesy of His Majesty’s navy.”
    “A Burton?” Kaz asked.
    “Buy the farm, go for a Burton, it’s all the same. Die,” Tom explained. “Burton is an ale. So gone for a Burton and never come back, see?”
    “Why not?” I said, watching Tom for any signs of the black dog, as Churchill called his deep depressions. “You’re all right, Tom? Just knocked down?”
    “Look at this,” Tom said with a grin, sticking a finger in a rip on the shoulder of his uniform jacket. “Shrapnel missed nicking me by half an inch.” He was none the worse for wear. As bad as the shelling had been, it was new to him. It happened on the ground, not high in the night sky over Germany. That was my theory, anyway.
    We dropped Tom off in North Cornworthy. He said his pal Constable