Read Online Hero on a Bicycle by Shirley Hughes - Free Book Online

able to discover that the young, fair-haired Englishman was Flight Lieutenant David Graham, a Royal Air Force pilot whose Spitfire had been shot down near Monte Cassino. After bailing out with only minor injuries, he had been treated in a German military hospital and then transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp near Bologna. His companion was Sergeant Joe Zolinski of the First Canadian Division. He had been captured when he had run into a column of German panzers during some heavy fighting around Pontecorvo and had ended up in the same prisoner-of-war camp. Like his English comrade, he still bore the marks of exhaustion. He was tall and deeply sunburned and would have had an athletic build if the months of captivity had not taken their toll. Constanza had a swift impression of light gray eyes set in a haggard, unshaven young face. He broke into a wide grin. “They treated us OK, more or less,” he said. “The food was pretty terrible, but the boredom was worse — caged up all the time with nothing to look at but barbed wire. David and I were in the same hut. We played a hell of a lot of chess — he’s not much good at it, but I’m worse.”
    “You can say that again,” said David.
    “It was when the rumor got out that we were going to be moved north to another camp in Germany that I got seriously scared. Well, we all did — but I’m half Jewish. Never bothered me before. Why should it? My dad died when I was a kid, and my mom’s French-Canadian, so I was brought up a Catholic, like her. But it’s the Jewish last name that registers with these Fascists. Even if you go to Mass every Sunday, they still get suspicious.”
    “Camps in Germany are a lot tougher,” added David. “So we knew if we wanted to escape, it was now or never.”
    “How did you manage it?” asked Constanza.
    “It was the Partisans who helped spring us,” Joe told her. “They’ve got contacts, those boys. I got a message inside a bread roll. Don’t ask me how they got it in there. It told me they could get two of our guys out, me and one other, so I picked David. Seems like I’m fated to be stuck with him.” They exchanged comradely grins in the dark.
    “They told us to act normal and be on the alert,” Joe went on. “Mostly we were kept in the camp, only allowed in the exercise yard at certain times. But sometimes some of us were taken out on working parties. Repairing roads, that sort of stuff — under guard, of course. So we were out digging ditches on a stretch of road near a field of corn, and there was this scarecrow stuck up there — old raggedy coat, battered hat, straw hair, and all. Except it wasn’t a scarecrow. There was a guy inside who started firing at us with a rifle. Just a few shots — missed us, of course, since he wasn’t trying to hit us, but it sure grabbed the attention of our guards. They were yelling at each other in German and firing back, and in all the commotion, this other guy appeared out of nowhere and got us away. We ran like hell up a path behind an olive grove and into the woods before they noticed we were gone. The guy in the scarecrow managed to get away, too — can’t think how he did it. They seem to know how to kind of melt into the landscape.”
    “They took us on foot through the mountains, and we’ve been hiding out with them until they arranged to bring us here,” David told her. “It was hard, being with the Partisans. They’re a pretty tough lot. There’s a guy in charge — the one who contacted you — but they’re not all buddies or in total agreement with each other. Far from it. There’s a lot of tension between them. Some of them hate the Communists, the Reds. But they are holding together, at least until our chaps liberate Florence.”
    “Which will be soon?” asked Constanza.
    Joe shrugged. “Who knows for sure? I guess so. I sure want to be back with my outfit before it happens, though.”

F or Rosemary, sitting upstairs in her room, the day was dragging by