The Last Green Valley by Mark Sullivan EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Mark Sullivan
- Genre: Historical Literary Fiction, Historical Biographical Fiction, Historical German Fiction
- Publish Date: 4 May 2021
- Size: 3 MB
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Avail for Download
- Price: Free
Late March 1944
Romanian Governorate of Transnistria
A cold wind blew in the dawn light. Bombs echoed from the north and east.
The rumble of war was getting closer by the minute.
Twenty-eight-year-old Adeline Martel struggled out the back door of
her kitchen in heavy winter clothes, carrying a crate full of cooking utensils
toward a covered wagon harnessed to two dray horses in front of her modest
home in the remote, tiny farming village of Friedenstal.
A damaged German Panzer tank clanked and rattled past her in the
early-morning light, upsetting the horses. Trucks filled with wounded
German soldiers streamed after the tank. Adeline could hear their cries and
tortured sufferings long after they’d passed, and she could see more trucks
and more horse- and mule-drawn wagons like hers coming from the east,
silhouetted with the rising sun at their backs.
“Mama!” cried her younger son, Wilhelm, who’d run out the back door
behind her.
“Not now, Will,” Adeline said, puffing as she reached the back of the
large V-shaped wooden wagon with oiled canvases stretched over a wooden
frame to form a bonnet for shelter.
“But I need to know if I can bring this,” said the four-and-a-half-yearold, holding up a rock, one of his latest prized possessions.
“Bring your wool hat instead,” she said as she found room for the crate
along with a second one that held dishes, cups, and baking tins beside a third
that contained crocks of flour, yeast, salt, pepper, lard, and other essentials
for their survival.
Emil hustled around the other side of the house, toting a keg-shaped
barrel with a lid.
“How much?” she asked.
“Eight kilos dried pork. Ten kilos dried beef.”
“I left space for it back here.”
Another tank clanked by as her thirty-two-year-old husband grunted,
hoisted the small barrel into the back, and began lashing it to the wall of the
wagon.
“I’ll get all the onions and potatoes from the cellar,” she said.
“Bedding’s packed.”
“I’ll get the big water sack filled,” he said before another bomb hit to
the northeast.
Their older son, six-and-a-half-year-old Waldemar, came out from
behind the house, pulling a small replica of the larger wagon about a meter
long with the same high sides and back and the same wooden axles and
wheels with tin nailed around the rims.
“Good boy, Walt,” Adeline said, pointing at the wagon. “I need that.”
She took the handle from him and turned the little wagon around. “Follow
me. Fast now. I need your help.”
The boys followed her to the root cellar and helped her frantically dig
up their stock of potatoes, onions, and beets. Then they moved them to the
little wagon and hurried back to the larger one. There were more German
trucks and crippled armored vehicles on the road now and dozens of covered
wagons and horses, all heading west, all trying to outrun Joseph Stalin’s
armies, which were on the attack again.
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