About a week after this it’s getting to be summer warm for the first time. It’s the kind of weather I thought we’d have when we started this war by landing on those beaches. For months, we’ve been sleeping in all our clothes, taking our shoes off as usual, tucking them in the bottom of the sack and then being ready to roll at a moment’s notice. Now, I’m sleeping in just my shorts and OD undershirt. I don’t even have socks on. I’m practically a civilian.
Well, where we are now, it’s been quiet for more than a week and we’re settled down in a little forest. It’s very pleasant, like camping out. The field kitchen’s actually caught up with us. I’ve learned to say ‘haben sie eine?’ Fresh eggs we have not had. I’m not really sure where we are, somewhere in what became East Germany.
We’re all in our tents, sound asleep. I have my pack at my head, with my loot in it, tucked in at the top of the tent in the little triangular shaped back. I have it tucked up there to be safe. Rolin and I aren’t making too big a deal of it. I’ve made my plan for trying to get these home, I am carrying a Kraut gas mask in my duffel bag, my looting days are over. I feel . . . it’s hard to explain, I don’t feel guilty about those jewels. I truly feel I’m liberating these stones from the enemy, the Germans. They’re the enemy, and we’re so conditioned, after all the misery and killing, to think of them that way, not as human beings. What the hell, taking their jewellery is nothing compared to what they’ve done.
Then, in the middle of the night, there’s all kinds of hollering, shooting and shouting. I run out of the tent. At first, I can’t figure what it’s all about. It looks like German commandos or SS or something, but turns out to be a group of Hitler Youth with their leader wearing a uniform like a boy scout leader and carrying a sword. These are all kids, twelve to fifteen years old at the most, and they have handmade flame throwers, with garden sprays and gasoline. These contraptions are amazingly effective. The little devils are spraying every which way, spraying the tents, spraying the whole camp, hollering and screaming at the same time. They have some small arms, too. I take off like a rabbit, with just my rifle, that’s all, and I run barefoot, in my shorts, over the pine needles, doing everything I can to get out of there fast.
We reach another little wood, and they’re still running around spraying everything. They also have Jerry cans filled with fuel oil and they spread it around, too, and light that.
When we finally come back after chasing off those kids, most of us naked or only half dressed, we have a hell of a time putting the fires out and saving what equipment we can. Our tent is totally burned and just about everything in it. What I’m interested in is my loot. I go back there and fish around in the charcoal and ashes. There’s nothing. I don’t know just what happened, but almost everybody’s field pack has been taken. I guess wearing them makes the kids feel more like soldiers or something, ready for the next war. Rifles and pistols are left, only the field packs are taken, nothing else, not even the blankets that weren’t burned. And with the field packs these kids and their boy scout leader have disappeared into the night. Luckily, I have the canteen with the scarves tied up on the branch of a tree.
Well that was the end of my career as a jewel thief. But some kid must have gotten a nice surprise if he unsewed some of those patches.