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Saint Vith."
    "Hey, don't tell him anything!" someone shouted.  
    The German officer just laughed. "Come now, these are hardly military secrets."
    "You're a goddamn Kraut!" an American shouted. Then he spat on the frozen ground.  
    A German sergeant with a nasty scar on his cheek stepped forward and drove his rifle butt into the man's belly so that he crumpled to the ground. The soldier lifted the rifle as if about to club the man again.
    "Nein, nein!" the handsome officer said sharply. The soldier stepped away. Then the officer raised his voice again and addressed the Americans. "You are all prisoners now! Do as you are told and there will be no trouble."
    At gunpoint, the Germans began to herd the captured Americans away from the road and into the snowy fields. The village was within sight with its modest houses and a few small outbuildings. At the edge of the field was a low stone wall topped with a worm fence like you saw in old Civil War photographs. The edge of the forest began just beyond that.
    There was enough of a breeze to give the air an icy edge. Hank wasn’t wearing gloves and his hands began to tingle in the cold. He did not dare to lower his arms, so he flexed his fingers, trying to keep them warm. Wherever they were going, it promised to be a long, cold march.
    "Nothing to it, Kid," Ralph muttered. "In fact, we're lucky. We'll be sitting out the rest of the war in a POW camp eating schnitzel while the other poor bastards shoot at each other."
    They stood in the field for what seemed to be a very long time, getting colder by the minute. For now, the Germans largely ignored the captured Americans, except for a few guards who had been posted to keep an eye on them. More than a few guys studied the distant stone wall and calculated whether or not they could reach it before the guards opened up on them. Nobody tried it—out in the open field, there was no way to outrun a bullet, no matter how fast you were.
    Ralph seemed to read his thoughts. "Don't even think about it, Kid. You’ll never make it."  
    Over by the road, the Germans ransacked the convoy. The officer who had interrogated the lieutenant was all business now, shouting orders to his men. They quickly commandeered the trucks and drove them over to their own vehicles, then began loading equipment aboard. They seemed particularly excited when they came across a few spare drums of gasoline. Hank figured they must be hard up—a tank had to use a lot of fuel. Also, it appeared that the Germans had been short vehicles so that a lot of their men had to hoof it through the snow. Laughing and joking, the Germans climbed aboard the trucks.  
    "I guess we're gonna have to walk," somebody said. "It's gonna be hard to keep up."
    "Nah, they'll send us back behind their lines."
    "What lines? As far as we knew as of yesterday, the nearest Germans were twenty miles away."
    Then a change seemed to come over the Germans. The activity of securing the American trucks ended, and they turned their attention back to the prisoners. Hank could not tell what they were saying, but there was a definite change in the mood, almost like the way the air changes before a thunderstorm.
    Ralph felt it, too.
    "Something's up," he said. For the first time, he sounded nervous. "I hate to say it, Kid, but I don't like the looks of this."
    The SS officer climbed aboard a tank and waved, and the German column began to move off. However, another officer stayed behind with about twenty men, who formed a loose line between the road and the captured soldiers. One of the Germans shouted something, and the guards moved away from the Americans to join the other SS men. None of them were that far away—maybe about thirty feet, which was close enough to see the looks on the Germans' faces. What scared Hank was that they did not appear angry, just blank—as if they weren't looking at anything at all.
    Then the SS sergeant with the scar on his face stepped forward, leveled his rifle at the nearest