Author's Note: This will be a series of vignettes, featuring all of the major and some of the minor POW characters in the series, along with a couple of OCs from earlier stories of mine. None of the vignettes need any familiarity with any of my earlier stories to work for new readers, though. The vignettes aren't in chronological order (except the last one does come after the others), but there is an organizing principle. I think you'll all figure it out quite quickly.

ooOoo

Chapter 1: Barnes

It's summer hot today, and humid too. It doesn't usually get real hot here in Germany in the summer, but today's a doozy. It should remind me of the summer air at home in Oklahoma, but somehow the air here in Germany always feels different to me.

But there's one thing that's too familiar: the taste of dust on my tongue. There hasn't been any rain in nearly two weeks, and the compound is dry and dusty.

That's better than the muck we get with too much rain, but it still reminds me of the dust storms from . . . gosh, ten years ago now, during the worst of the Dust Bowl. I was still a kid then, and we lived in the eastern part of Oklahoma, so we didn't get it so bad like the folks so much further west in the Panhandle did, but we still had some storms that dropped dust on us. I talked with Carter about the Dust Bowl once, because he went through worse up on the farm he grew up on in North Dakota. He hates dust too.

So today, which is hot with just enough wind to pick up the dust and swirl it into my eyes and nose and mouth, would of course be the day I pull a work detail picking up cigarette butts and other trash out in the compound. Wish I'd drawn laundry duty instead, like my best buddy Jim Davis did. I'd be with him, for one thing, and that'd be more fun because we're always kidding around. Plus, getting kinda wet washing out uniforms and underclothes sounds pretty good right now in this heat. But no, I'm stuck picking up trash.

Corporal Langenscheidt is supervising us, and he looks as tired and hot as the rest of us. Everything's kind of gray today: him, us, the wooden buildings, the guard towers, our uniforms, the dusty ground. It's like all the color has been sucked out of the world. I sigh. Stalag 13 is so ugly. The only pretty things to look at are the woods outside camp and the sky. But you can't see the woods all that well from a lot of the camp, and today even the sky is a kind of washed-out whitish blue, because there's so much humidity in the air.

We move around one barracks after another, poking one little cigarette butt after another and sticking each one in the long canvas bags we have slung from our shoulders. It's tedious and boring, plus the litter stick is too long for a short guy like me, which makes it awkward for me to reach the trash and put it in my bag. As we finish around the barracks I wish we were done, but Langenscheidt marches us across the compound to do the area around the Kommandantur.

I scan the sky as we work our way across the compound. Clouds are building up, big white fluffy ones that are gray underneath. Not even going to have any color in the sky now. But we should get some relief from the sun when the clouds get here, and maybe even some rain. The guys doing laundry won't be happy with that, because they'll have to take everything down and string it up in the barracks, like we do in the winter. But at least the clean clothes won't be full of dust.

We work our way around the front of the Kommandant's office around to the back, where his quarters are. The clouds are thicker now, and the relief from the sun feels good. I feel a little more wind. It's picking up. There's a little garden in front of the porch, with some ornamental flowers and shrubs, including a couple of rose bushes. In the heat, after the dry weather, all the plants look a bit discouraged, especially the roses. They have a couple of blooms, but they're covered with dust too.

The wind abruptly whips up, picking up the grit and coating us all with another fine layer of dust. I close my eyes and cover my face with my sleeve for a moment, trying not to breathe the stuff in and to keep it outa my eyes. Then suddenly a few raindrops fall, a promise of a real rain to come. Corporal Langenscheidt, after a glance at the glowering sky, tells us we can go back to the barracks, but we have to get rid of our trash bags properly first.

I turn to go when a flash of color grabs my eye, a brilliant deep red against all the background gray. I look a little closer and see that a couple of the spattering raindrops have hit the petals of one of the roses, washing off the dust and revealing a deep red. The wet spot looks like velvet, glows like a jewel, freshly washed by clean water from the sky. It's the prettiest thing I've seen since . . . well, I can't remember when. Reminds me that my Ma has roses like that out behind our house back home, that same deep velvet red.

I suddenly feel a sting in my eyes that has nothing to do with the grit blowing around. Who'd have thought that just seeing raindrops on roses could do that?