Between Snowflakes and Surrender: How American Soldiers Defied the Blizzard, Their Orders, and Their Own Fears to Carry German Women Prisoners of War Toward a Chance at Mercy, Warmth, and Unexpected Humanity

The first snowflake landed on Jack Harlow’s sleeve just as the column began to move.

It was a fat, lazy thing, drifting sideways in the wind, so light it seemed to hesitate before committing to his worn wool. Jack watched it melt into a dark bead of water against the olive drab and thought, That’s wrong. It’s too early. The sky wasn’t like this an hour ago.

Then the second flake came, and the third, and in another minute the air was full of sliding white static, as if someone had turned down the world and turned up the snow.

“Eyes front, Harlow,” Sergeant Cole barked. His breath steamed under the rim of his helmet. “We get to Saint-Aubin before dark or we’re part of the landscape, you understand me?”

“Yes, Sarge,” Jack said automatically.

Ahead of him, the line of prisoners stumbled into motion—twenty or so German women, some in ragged civilian coats, some in the gray-green remnants of uniforms that no longer looked like anything official. They moved slowly, chained together in pairs by rope at the wrist, their boots sliding on the already-slick road.

Jack’s gaze snagged on one of them—small, pale, her blonde hair twisted into a tight knot under a wool cap that might have once been white. She carried herself straighter than the others, though there was a tremor to her steps. She clutched a bag to her chest, something lumpy inside wrapped in fabric.

She glanced back, just once, toward the Americans behind them. For a moment their eyes met. Hers were blue-gray, like the sky just before the storm breaks.

Then the wind shoved a curtain of snow between them.

---

Lotte Bauer could not feel her fingers.

They were there—she could see them, red and raw where they gripped the coarse rope that tied her wrist to Klara’s—but each one might have belonged to someone else, someone far away. Pain had given way to a kind of high, humming numbness. That frightened her more than the pain.

“Lotte,” Klara muttered, voice muffled by the scarf around her face. “You have to lift your feet. You’re dragging.”

“I’m lifting,” Lotte said, though she wasn’t sure she was. The snow was already above her ankles, light and powdery but deepening with every hesitant step.

They had been marched for hours before the snow began. Captured at a field hospital that morning, processed in a blur of shouted English and hands waving them into lines, then counted, searched, and turned onto the road like cattle.

Lotte had been a nurse before the war swallowed that word and replaced it with others—sister, auxiliary, helper. She had seen wounded men of every possible kind, had held pressure on wounds that bubbled with breath and blood, had looked into more dying eyes than she wanted to count. But she had never felt as small and helpless as she did now, bundled in a coat too thin for this wind, boots with cracked soles, marching into a white world that seemed determined to erase even their footprints.

Behind them, the Americans called to one another. Their language was still strange music to her—hard consonants, easy vowels, a lazy swing that made even their curses sound casual. She heard a barked laugh, then Sergeant Cole’s voice cutting sharp through the wind.

“Pick it up! We don’t have all night!”

Lotte stumbled. A patch of unseen ice skittered under her heel. Her legs flew out from under her and she crashed onto her knees, snow burning her skin through the fabric as if it were fire.

Klara jerked forward, hauled by the rope between them. “Lotte!”

Lotte tried to push herself up. Her limbs answered with slow, clumsy movements. The snow was already gathering on her coat, in her hair, settling like a shroud on the road around them.

Boots thudded close. An American soldier loomed over her, shadowed by the brim of his helmet, rifle slung across his chest. He looked younger up close than she’d expected, with a jaw still soft at the corners and eyes that darted uncertainly over her face before sliding away.

“Up,” he said, gesturing with his free hand. “Come on.” His accent stretched the word into C’mon.

She understood the meaning, if not every sound. She tried again. Her knees wobbled. The world tilted.

“Sie kann nicht,” Klara gasped. “She can’t—she’s—”

Lotte’s vision drew in around the edges, as if someone was tightening a noose of darkness. The snowflakes seemed to fall slower and slower, each one a tiny white star drifting toward her.

“They’ll leave us,” Klara whispered in German, voice trembling. “They’ll leave us to freeze on the road, Lotte. Get up. Please.”

“Hey!” The American’s voice sharpened. “On your feet, Fräulein. Let’s go.”

Lotte looked up at him. His outline blurred, then snapped into focus, then blurred again as her eyes filled with involuntary tears that froze on her lashes almost as soon as they appeared.

“I…” she said, in German, then realized it was useless and tried in halting English. “I am… sorry.”

The last thing she remembered clearly was the snow on his sleeve.

---

Jack swore under his breath as the German woman’s eyes rolled back and she sagged sideways into the drift.

He didn’t know much German beyond the words everyone knew—Hände hoch, schnell, raus. He didn’t need to speak her language to know what was happening. She’d been moving slower and slower for miles, the lines around her mouth tightening each time the wind cut down the road. Her lips were a frightening bluish color now.

“Goddamn it,” muttered Private Frank Donner, trudging up beside Jack. “We don’t have time for this. Cole’s gonna blow a gasket.”

“She’ll die if she stays here,” Jack said.

“Yeah, well,” Frank answered, gesturing at the white world ahead, “I don’t see a whole lot of good options for anybody out here.”

The snow was already coming down harder, thick flakes swirling in mad little dances before slamming into their faces. Jack squinted through it. The line of prisoners was starting to accordion—those in front forced slower by those in the middle, those in the rear nearly stepping on the heels of the Americans behind them.

“Sarge!” Frank called, raising his voice. “We got a downed one!”

Sergeant Cole slogged back along the line, his frame bulky with layers. Snow clung to his eyelashes. He took in the scene—one unconscious woman on the ground, another kneeling beside her, the rope taut between their wrists—and his jaw clenched.

“Is she playing possum?” he asked.

Jack shook his head. “She went down slow. Been fading for a while. She’s freezing.”

Cole hissed through his teeth, the sound half lost to the wind. “We’re already behind schedule,” he said. “Command wants these prisoners in Saint-Aubin before midnight. There’s a roof there. That’s their best shot. We stop every time someone decides to take a nap, we’ll be buried out here.”

“It’s not a nap, Sarge,” Jack said. “It’s hypothermia. If we leave her, she’s done.”

Cole’s eyes locked on his. The sergeant was tired—that kind of tired that lived in the corners of the mouth and the slump of the shoulders, the tired of men who’d seen too many towns that all looked the same and too many faces that didn’t stick in memory. But there was still steel in his gaze.

“You forget who they are, Harlow?” he asked quietly. “Those bombs didn’t just fall on our side. They had help. These aren’t little lost lambs.”

“I know who they are,” Jack said, hearing his own voice come out more sharply than he intended. “I also know freezing to death on the side of the road isn’t supposed to be the sentence.”

Cole’s jaw worked. For a moment, Jack wondered if he’d gone too far. Talking back in this weather, with nerves already raw, was a good way to wind up on report—or worse.

The woman on the ground made a faint sound, somewhere between a gasp and a sigh.

Klara—Jack only knew her name later, but he could see the desperation in her now—grabbed at Cole’s coat with her free hand. “Please,” she begged, in heavily accented English. “Please, not leave. She is nurse. She help wounded. She is good. Please.”

Cole looked down at her hand and then at the unconscious woman. Something flickered across his face. Memory, maybe. A far-off farmhouse, a different winter.

He leaned closer. “We’re not leaving her,” he said finally, gruff. “We don’t leave anyone. But she doesn’t walk, somebody’s gonna carry her, and it sure as hell isn’t gonna be me the whole way.”

He turned to Jack. “You want to save her, Harlow? Congratulations. She’s yours.”

---

The argument didn’t start until an hour later, but the seed of it lodged in Jack’s shoulders the instant Cole said those words.

He slung his rifle across his back, knelt in the snow, and got his arms under the woman’s limp form. She was lighter than he expected; the cold had eaten her weight. When he hoisted her up, she made a small, startled sound, her head lolling against his chest. The bag she’d been carrying slipped from her grasp and thumped into the snow.

“Wait,” Klara said, grabbing for it. Jack nodded and let her scoop it up. She hugged it to herself, eyes wide and glassy.

Cole barked at the rest of the column. “We move! Now! Anybody else thinking of collapsing, think again!”

The line lurched forward.

At first, carrying her seemed manageable. Jack had hauled heavier loads—ammo crates, wounded buddies—across worse ground. But the wind picked up, the snow deepened, and every step turned into a battle. The unconscious woman was a dead weight against him, her breath shallow and icy where it puffed weakly against his scarf.

He tried to adjust his grip without dropping her. Her hair brushed his chin, smelling faintly of smoke and something floral that the war hadn’t quite managed to scrub away.

Frank trudged beside him for a while in silence, then finally said, “You’re gonna break your damn back.”

“Someone had to take her,” Jack muttered.

“Could’ve been someone who actually eats their rations,” Frank said, attempting a joke that fell flat in the snowy air. “Look, I get it, okay? You’re the resident saint. But we barely know where we’re going. Visibility’s going to hell. If we don’t keep pace, we’re not gonna reach that village tonight.”

“I know,” Jack said.

“So what’s the plan?” Frank asked. “You carrying her fifteen miles through a blizzard? You think we’re in the movies?”

Jack didn’t answer. He didn’t have a plan, just a stubborn refusal to set this bundle of fading life down in the snow and walk away.

He thought of his brother, Tom, freezing in a foxhole during the winter back home before they’d ever shipped out. Pneumonia had taken Tom quietly while the war was still a rumor, while posters still showed clean uniforms and neat victories. There had been no enemy gun to blame, just a cough that turned ugly and a fever that wouldn’t break.

Jack had stared at the closed coffin and thought, He should have had a chance. Just a chance.

This woman—this enemy—had that same fragile look around the eyes now. And Jack, who had not been able to save his brother, found that he could not accept letting her slip away without at least trying.

The snow intensified. Daylight vanished behind a curtain of white. The world shrank to the hunched shoulders and bowed heads in front of him, the crunch of boots, the sound of distant artillery muffled by the storm.

At some point he realized they were no longer on the main road. Cole had taken a side track, a narrower lane lined with skeletal trees and half-buried fence posts. The wind howled through the branches like something alive.

“We’re cutting across,” Cole shouted over his shoulder. “Shorter this way.”

“Shorter,” Frank muttered under his breath, “but not necessarily better.”

They marched.

The cold crept into Jack’s bones, then his thoughts. Time stopped being a series of minutes and instead became steps—one more, and then another, and another. Each one an act of will.

The woman in his arms stirred occasionally, a low, broken sound coming from her throat, but she didn’t fully wake. He could feel her trembling subsiding, and he knew enough from the Army’s field manuals to understand that wasn’t good news. When the shivering stops, the book said, get them warm fast.

Warmth was a fairy tale out here.

Snow crusted his eyelashes, his eyebrows, the edges of his scarf. His fingers, even in gloves, ached with a brutal, dull persistence. His back throbbed.

He lost track of how long they’d been moving like that before the world narrowed even further and the argument truly began.

---

It started because of the trees.

The lane they’d taken dipped into a shallow hollow, the ground there sheltered slightly from the wind but clogged with drifts that reached nearly to Jack’s knees. The prisoners faltered; the Americans cursed and pushed them along.

Then, ahead, a dark line loomed in the white—a stand of pines clustered so closely that their branches formed a rough wall across the path.

Cole halted. The column, slowed by the snow, bunched up behind him.

“What now?” Frank muttered.

Cole conferred briefly with Corporal Davis, their squad leader, voices lost in the storm. Then he turned, raising both arms.

“Listen up!” he shouted. “Path’s choked ahead. We’ll cut around it. That means leaving the road. We don’t have time to go back and try the other route. This storm’s getting worse by the minute.”

Somewhere in the middle of the group, one of the women sobbed. Another coughed, a deep, hacking sound.

Cole’s gaze flicked over the prisoners. “Anybody can’t keep up,” he said tightly, “better make their peace now. We can’t afford dead weight.”

The phrase hung in the air like ice.

Jack felt heat rise in his chest despite the cold. “Dead weight,” he repeated under his breath.

Frank shot him a warning look. “Don’t,” he said softly. “Not now.”

But the words were already boiling up, pushed by exhaustion and the burning ache in Jack’s muscles.

“With respect, Sarge,” he said loud enough for Cole to hear, “she’s not dead weight. None of them are. They’re prisoners. That makes them our responsibility.”

Cole’s head snapped around. “You want to repeat that, Harlow?”

Jack held his gaze. “If we start deciding who gets to live based on who walks fast enough in the snow, we’re not much better than the stories we heard about them.”

A ripple went through the line. Some of the other soldiers looked away; others watched with a mixture of curiosity and unease.

Corporal Davis stepped between them, palms up. “Okay,” he said wearily. “Let’s not turn this into a philosophy class in the middle of a damn blizzard. Sarge, the men are beat. Harlow’s been carrying that girl for miles. Maybe we take ten. Get our bearings. Figure out if this detour is even worth it.”

“We don’t have ten,” Cole snapped. “You see the sky? This isn’t a flurry, Davis. It’s a whiteout coming. We stop, we get buried. You want them on your conscience? Because I’m trying to get as many of us as possible to that village, prisoners included.”

Jack shifted the weight in his arms, wincing. The woman’s head lolled against his shoulder. Up close, her lips were cracked, a little line of frozen blood at one corner.

“Then let us help,” Jack said stubbornly. “We can rotate carrying her. And maybe some of the others who are struggling. We distribute the load, we move faster.”

Frank stared at him. “We can rotate?”

“You got a better idea?” Jack shot back.

Davis looked from one to the other. “He’s not wrong, Sarge,” he said grudgingly. “We lose people out here, might as well have left them in that barn we pulled them from. Command wanted live prisoners, remember?”

Cole’s shoulders slumped slightly. The fight seemed to go out of him, replaced by a weary resignation.

“Fine,” he said. “We try it Harlow’s way. But I’m saying this once: anyone who can’t keep moving, anyone who slows us enough that we all risk getting stuck, I will order left behind. I’m not losing my whole squad because we turned into a charity march. Understood?”

His gaze swept over the men and then over the line of women, though most of them couldn’t understand his words. The tone was enough.

“Understood,” Davis said.

“Yes, Sarge,” Frank echoed.

Jack swallowed. “Yes, Sarge.”

Cole jerked his chin. “Davis, get some guys to start cutting a path around those trees. Harlow, you want to play hero, you coordinate who carries who. Make it quick. Snow’s not gonna politely wait while we sort our feelings.”

He stomped off toward the front again.

Jack exhaled slowly, his breath steaming.

Frank shook his head. “You just had to poke the bear, didn’t you?”

“If I hadn’t, who would have?” Jack asked.

Frank snorted. “Your sense of responsibility is gonna get us all killed, you know that?”

“Maybe,” Jack said, adjusting his grip on the unconscious woman. “But not today.”

---

They fell into a rhythm born less of strategy than desperation.

Jack carried the blonde woman—who he’d later learn was named Lotte—for another half mile before his arms started to shake. Then Private Morales took her for a stretch, muttering Spanish prayers under his breath, his breath coming in ragged puffs. When Morales nearly dropped her crossing a hidden ditch, Davis stepped in and hoisted her like she weighed nothing, though Jack could see the muscle jumping in his jaw with each step.

Other prisoners faltered. A woman with a hacking cough stumbled so badly she went to her knees three times in as many minutes. Frank, grumbling, slung her arm over his shoulders and half-dragged, half-carried her forward.

At some point, in the blur of snow and breath and pain, Lotte woke.

Jack realized it when he felt fingers twitch weakly against his chest. He looked down and found her eyes open, unfocused but aware.

“You’re back,” he said, surprising himself.

Her brows drew together. “Back?” she whispered.

“Awake,” he corrected. “You passed out. We’re, uh… still walking. Still freezing. But you’re not on the road anymore, so that’s an upgrade.”

Her lips moved soundlessly. Then, after a visible effort, she managed, “You… did not leave us.”

“No,” Jack said simply.

She closed her eyes briefly, as if the answer hurt. When she opened them again, she looked over his shoulder, toward where Klara trudged, still roped to her.

“Lotte,” Klara called, relief evident in her voice despite the wind stealing half the sound. “You are awake.”

Lotte tried to turn her head, but the movement made her hiss softly in pain.

“Don’t do that,” Jack said. “You’ll regret it.”

She looked back up at him, studying his face. There was something like confusion there, and uncertainty, and a kind of naked vulnerability Jack wasn’t used to seeing on anyone, let alone someone who’d worn the enemy’s colors that morning.

“You are… carrying me,” she said, English words stiff on her tongue.

“Well, I’d be lying if I said you were carrying me,” Jack replied, unable to stop himself. “Name’s Jack, by the way. Jack Harlow.”

A tiny line appeared between her brows. “Lotte,” she said. “Lotte Bauer.”

He nodded. “Nice to meet you, Lotte Bauer. Though I could think of nicer circumstances.”

She tried to smile. It came out more like a grimace.

“Why?” she whispered, after a small dragging pause. “Why you do… this?”

It was a question Jack had been trying not to ask himself too loudly. Out here, where the wind could pluck thoughts right out of your head and turn them to ice, self-doubt was a dangerous luxury.

“Because I didn’t like the alternative,” he said finally. “Because leaving you there felt wrong.”

“That all?” she pressed, with surprising stubbornness.

Jack considered. “My brother died of the cold,” he said, surprising himself with the words. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud, had certainly never intended to say it to her. “Back home. Before I ever saw a battlefield. He never got a chance to fight back. You… still do. Maybe not with guns or uniforms anymore. But with… something. I don’t know. Breathing. Living. That counts for something.”

Her eyes shone, not with tears—those would have frozen on her cheeks—but with a kind of fierce, fragile light.

“You think I deserve this chance?” she asked quietly.

He sighed, feeling the weight of the storm pressing down on all of them. “I think the world’s already decided too many people don’t.”

She was silent for a long few steps. The snow whispered under their boots.

Then, so softly he almost didn’t hear it, she said, “They say Americans will leave us to freeze. In the stories. They say you have no mercy for us.”

“Yeah, well,” Jack said, shifting her weight as his arms ached, “they say a lot of things. Some are true. Some aren’t. Today, this one isn’t.”

She studied him with a searching look, as if trying to reconcile the tales she’d heard with the man carrying her through the storm.

“If I die,” she said, “it will not be because you leave me.”

He swallowed. “No,” he said. “Not if I can help it.”

---

By the time they reached the ridge, the storm was in full fury.

The path Cole had chosen wound up the side of a low, treeless slope, the ground underfoot a treacherous mix of packed snow and hidden ice. The wind hit them broadside, flinging shards of ice into their faces hard enough to sting.

Cole pushed ahead, head down, every line of his body bent toward the invisible goal of the village that supposedly lay beyond. Davis slogged behind him, breaking trail through drifts that rose to his thighs.

Halfway up, the column began to fray again. One of the prisoners slipped and slid backward a few feet before another woman grabbed her rope and hauled her back, both of them panting, eyes wild. Frank cursed under his breath and tightened his grip on the coughing woman he was helping.

Jack’s legs burned. Every step with Lotte’s weight in his arms felt like lifting through wet cement. His lungs hurt from sucking in air so cold it seemed to scrape the inside raw.

“Switch,” Morales gasped, stumbling up beside him. “I take her.”

Jack hesitated, then nodded, carefully transferring Lotte into Morales’s arms. She made a faint noise, half protest, half relief, as the world tilted.

Jack staggered away, flexing his hands. They felt clumsy and swollen, as if his fingers had become someone else’s. He shook them out, then moved to the side of another prisoner whose lips were purple with cold, taking some of her weight to steady her.

For a few minutes, they made progress. Then the ridge steepened.

“Careful!” Davis shouted. “Watch your footing! One slip and you’ll take half of us with you.”

They trudged on.

Jack had just started to think they might actually make it to the top when the world went wrong.

It was subtle at first—a different note in the wind, the sound of something shivering beneath the howling. Then the snow near Frank’s boots cracked with a sharp, brittle sound.

“Stop!” Davis yelled. “Don’t—”

The drift under Frank’s feet collapsed.

For one terrifying moment, it was as if the entire side of the slope had decided to give up being solid and instead become air. Snow dropped away in a white river, carrying Frank, the woman he was supporting, and two other prisoners down in a tumbling, flailing mass.

Jack lunged instinctively, grabbing for the nearest rope. His fingers closed around it just as it went taut, nearly jerking him off his feet.

“Hold!” he shouted, though he wasn’t sure if he was yelling at the rope, himself, or the universe.

The column reacted in a chain of desperate movements. Davis flung himself sideways, digging his boots in and grabbing Jack’s arm. Morales clutched Lotte tighter and dropped to his knees, anchoring his weight. Other soldiers reached back, grabbing each other’s belts, rifle straps, anything solid.

For a moment that stretched long and thin, the entire group hung between sliding and stability.

Then, inch by inch, they began to pull.

Jack’s muscles screamed. His shoulders felt like they were tearing free. The rope bit into his fingers even through his gloves. Below, through the whipping snow, he could see glimpses of faces—Frank’s twisted in effort, the prisoner’s pale with terror.

“Come on!” Davis grunted. “Heave!”

They pulled as one, every man and woman on the ridge united in a single stubborn refusal to let go.

At last, with a scraping, shuddering lurch, the drift stabilized. The sliding snow slowed, then stopped. Frank’s boots found purchase on something solid. He and the women with him clawed their way back up, helped by the hauling from above.

They collapsed in a panting heap near Jack’s feet.

Frank rolled onto his back, staring up at the slate-gray sky. Snowflakes landed on his open mouth; he spat them out.

“If we live through this,” he groaned, “I’m never complaining about Kansas winters again.”

Jack let out a shaky laugh that was half hysteria, half relief. “You’re welcome,” he said, though he wasn’t sure who he was thanking, exactly.

Cole strode back down the line, scanning for injuries, his face tight. “Anybody broken?” he demanded.

There were scrapes, bruises, a twisted ankle, but by some miracle, no one was seriously hurt.

Cole’s gaze lingered on Jack’s white-knuckled grip on the rope. Something almost like reluctant respect flickered there.

“Nice save,” he said, grudging.

“We’re all in this together, right, Sarge?” Jack replied, breath still coming hard.

Cole snorted. “Don’t get sentimental on me, Harlow. Save it for the letters home.”

He turned and raised his voice. “We move! Carefully this time! Watch your step like it’s made of glass.”

The column shuffled back into motion.

As they climbed again, slower and more cautious, Lotte twisted her head toward Jack where he trudged beside Morales.

“You did not let them fall,” she said softly.

“Wasn’t just me,” he answered. “Took all of us.”

“But you grabbed the rope first,” she persisted. “You hold even when it hurt.”

He shrugged, trying to make light of it. “That’s what the Army pays me for. Heroic rope grabbing.”

Her lips quirked. “We did not think you would care,” she said after a moment.

Jack arched an eyebrow. “About what? You? Whether you fall off a hill?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “They tell us… if we are taken… we are nothing to you. Less than nothing. Just ghosts you move from place to place.”

He thought about that, his breath fogging the air between them. “Some guys might see it that way,” he admitted. “Some days, I almost do. Makes it easier not to think too hard. But then…” He gestured vaguely at the group. “Then you’re there. You’re real. You fall. You bleed. You freeze. Hard to pretend you’re ghosts when you’re hanging off a rope with us.”

Her eyes grew distant, as if she was trying to picture how that sounded from her side of the war.

“You talk like we are… same,” she said cautiously.

“I talk like we’re stuck in the same blizzard,” Jack replied. “That’s true whether I like it or not.”

---

The ridge leveled out at last, cresting into a plateau swept almost bare by the relentless wind. The snow here was thinner, scoured away in places to reveal patches of frozen earth. The visibility improved slightly, the white wall of the storm pulling back just enough to reveal a vague smear of darker shapes in the distance.

“Village,” Cole said, pointing. His voice carried a note Jack hadn’t heard all day: hope. “Saint-Aubin. That’s gotta be it.”

The word moved down the line like a small, bright flame. Village. Houses. Roofs. Fire. Walls between them and the wind.

For Lotte, the sight of those blurred shapes in the distance felt like something out of a dream. She had imagined she’d never see another town again except as rubble. Yet there it was, smeared charcoal against the snow.

“Almost,” she whispered.

“Almost,” Jack agreed, though he knew better than to relax too soon. The last mile of any march, he’d learned, could still kill you.

As they drew closer, details emerged. Saint-Aubin was a small place—maybe a dozen stone houses clustered along a narrow main street, a church steeple listing slightly to one side, its bell tower cracked. Thin threads of smoke rose from a few chimneys, quickly shredded by the wind.

The outskirts of the village were a mess of half-buried carts, broken fences, and shell craters softened by snow. Their boots crunched over shards of glass and splintered wood hidden beneath the powder.

A group of American MPs waited at the edge of town, hunched against the cold, their armbands stark white against dark uniforms. One of them stepped forward as Cole approached.

“You’re late,” the MP said, though his tone held more exhaustion than accusation.

“You’re welcome,” Cole shot back. “Blizzard wasn’t listed in the schedule. Got your prisoners, though. All of ’em.”

The MP’s gaze went down the line, ticking off numbers. His eyes narrowed when he reached Lotte in Morales’s arms.

“She can’t walk?” he asked.

“She’s half-frozen,” Jack answered before Morales could. “We’ve been taking turns carrying her. She needs a fire and blankets, fast, or you’re going to have one less to worry about.”

The MP studied him, then the woman, then the rest of the column. His shoulders rose and fell in a sigh that seemed pulled from somewhere very deep.

“Medical station’s in the church,” he said finally. “Get the worst cases there. The rest, we’ve got them in the old schoolhouse. It’s not the Ritz, but it’s dry.”

Cole nodded curtly. “You heard the man!” he barked. “Davis, take Harlow and a couple others, get the ones who look like they’re about to keel over to the medics. Everyone else, follow the MPs. Let’s get out of this damn weather.”

The column dissolved into motion, smaller groups peeling off. Jack, Morales, and Frank gathered Lotte, Klara, the coughing woman, and a few others who’d stumbled through most of the march, their faces gaunt and eyes too large.

The church, once inside, felt like another planet.

The air was still cold—nothing could truly be warm in weather like this without a massive amount of fuel—but compared to the howling chaos outside, it was blessedly still. The high stone walls trapped what heat there was from a large iron stove set up near the altar, its pipe snaking out a broken stained-glass window.

Cots lined the nave, the pews pushed aside. Men in white armbands with red crosses moved between them, checking bandages, taking pulses. The scent of antiseptic and sweat layered over the faint, lingering smell of incense and old wood.

A medic looked up as they entered. “More customers?” he asked, eyebrows lifting.

“Some of them were one snowdrift away from ice sculpture territory,” Frank said.

“Lay them here,” the medic said, indicating an empty row of cots.

Jack hesitated as he set Lotte down on the thin mattress. Without her weight in his arms, he suddenly felt light-headed, as if a piece of him were missing. The room seemed to tilt.

“Easy there, soldier,” the medic said, catching Jack’s elbow. “You look about as steady as a newborn calf.”

“I’m fine,” Jack lied.

“Sure,” the medic said dryly. “And I’m the Queen of England.”

He began unwinding the layers of scarf and coat from Lotte’s body with brisk efficiency. She hissed as the cold fabric peeled away from her skin.

“Name?” the medic asked her.

“Lotte Bauer,” she said faintly.

He nodded and checked her pulse, then peeled off one of her boots. Jack winced at the sight of her toes, pale and waxy with a frightening hint of gray.

“Frostbite’s flirting with her,” the medic muttered. “Could be worse, though. We’ll warm her up slow. No hot water, not yet. You cook tissue that cold, it dies for sure. We’ll start with blankets, body heat from other patients, maybe some warm drinks if the kitchen hasn’t frozen solid.”

Lotte’s gaze slid to Jack as the medic worked. “You go?” she asked.

He hesitated. “We’ve got to help get the others settled,” he said. “But I’ll check on you.”

She nodded, eyes half-closed. “You already do much,” she whispered. “Enough.”

He wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he settled for a simple, “You’re in good hands now.”

The medic snorted. “Flatterer,” he said. “Go on, get outta here before I decide to check your toes.”

Jack allowed himself one last look at Lotte, swaddled in blankets, a flush of living color finally creeping back into her cheeks. Then he turned and stepped back into the cold.

---

The storm raged all night.

Inside the makeshift barracks of the schoolhouse, the sound of the wind was a constant low roar, rattling the warped window frames and sending fine dust sifting from the ceiling. The prisoners huddled on the floor in rows, wrapped in surplus blankets, their breath puffing in faint clouds.

On the other side of a hastily erected partition of hung canvas, the American soldiers occupied the old classrooms. They’d pushed desks together, laid out bedrolls on chalk-dusted floors, and lit small, carefully tended stoves where possible.

Jack lay on his side on a thin mattress, staring at the dark. His body throbbed with the dull ache of overused muscles. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw snow—falling, sliding, burying. He saw ropes going taut and fingers slipping.

He also saw Lotte’s face, the way her eyes had looked up at him just before he left the church. There had been something in that gaze that he couldn’t quite name. Not gratitude, exactly—not only gratitude. Something more complicated, tangled up with fear and exhaustion and a strange, hesitant trust.

“You awake?” Frank’s voice came from the next mattress over, low in the dark.

“Yeah,” Jack said.

“Thought so. You got that insomniac breathing going on.”

Jack huffed a laugh. “Didn’t know that was a thing.”

“Buddy, I’ve been listening to you sleep for months. I know your whole symphony.” There was a rustle as Frank shifted, the springs under his weight squeaking softly. “You thinking about Snow Princess?”

Jack frowned in the dark. “Who?”

“The blonde,” Frank said. “The one you carried half the countryside. Bauer. Lotte. You’ve got that look like you left something out there.”

Jack considered lying, then decided he was too tired. “I’m thinking about all of it,” he said. “The march. The storm. How close we came to losing people. How we’re supposed to go from that to pretending it’s just another tick on the log.”

Frank was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was less teasing. “You did good out there,” he said. “Pain in the ass though you are. If you hadn’t spoken up, Cole might’ve left her. Maybe a couple others too, by the end.”

“He wouldn’t have,” Jack said automatically.

“You sure?” Frank asked. “You heard what he said. Heard what a lot of guys say, when they think nobody’s listening. This war… it rubs the edges off. Makes you see people as numbers. You pushed back. It mattered.”

Jack stared at the cracked plaster on the ceiling, barely visible in the faint light from the stove.

“I’m not trying to be a hero,” he said quietly.

“I know,” Frank replied. “That’s why it counts.”

They lay there in silence for a while, listening to the wind and the distant, muffled coughs from the prisoners’ side of the building.

“You really think they tell stories about us like that?” Jack asked suddenly. “Leaving them to freeze?”

Frank made a noncommittal sound. “I think they tell stories to make sense of what’s happening. Same as we do. Makes it easier to fight someone if you think they’re monsters.”

“And what does today make us?” Jack wondered.

“Complicated,” Frank said dryly. “We’re complicated monsters.”

Jack couldn’t help but smile at that, small and rueful.

Eventually, exhaustion dragged him under.

---

Lotte dreamed of home.

Not the bomb-scarred streets of the city where she’d been stationed, not the sterile corridors of field hospitals, but the small village where she’d grown up, tucked among rolling hills and quiet streams.

In the dream, snow fell there too, but gently—soft flakes drifting down onto the thatched roofs, smoothing the fields into rounded shapes. She walked up the lane toward her parents’ house, boots crunching, her breath rising white in the cold air.

Her mother stood at the doorway, apron dusted with flour, cheeks rosy from the oven’s heat. “You’re late,” she scolded, smiling. “Soup’s getting cold.”

Lotte tried to answer, but her voice didn’t work. The words stuck in her throat.

Then the scene shifted. The snow deepened suddenly, climbing up her legs, her waist, her chest. The friendly village vanished, replaced by an endless white field under a gray sky. Her mother’s face blurred, then faded completely.

Lotte sank, the cold closing over her. She thought, with a strange, distant calm, This is the part where they leave us. This is the story.

But then a hand reached down, strong fingers closing around her wrist, pulling. Another hand grabbed her other arm. More hands found purchase. The weight that had pinned her began to lift.

She surfaced from the dream with a gasp.

The church’s interior swam into focus slowly—the dim light, the shapes of other patients on neighboring cots, the faint crackle of the stove. Her body was wrapped in layers of blankets, and warmth, real warmth, pressed against her back and sides. The medic had arranged them like that—two wounded soldiers on either side of her, sharing their heat.

She shifted slightly. One of the men grunted in his sleep, but didn’t wake.

Her toes ached terribly, a deep, itching burn that made her want to curl in on herself. She took it as a good sign. Pain, she knew, meant the tissue was still alive.

Footsteps approached. The medic appeared at her side, a battered mug in his hand.

“You’re awake,” he observed. “Good. That spares me the fun of pouring this down your throat while you choke.”

She blinked up at him. “What… is ‘this’?”

“Lukewarm soup,” he said. “Don’t look so disappointed. In this weather, anything that’s not frozen solid is a luxury.”

He slipped an arm behind her shoulders and helped her sit up. The room tilted; she steadied herself with a hand on his sleeve.

“Slow,” he cautioned. “You move too fast, you’ll remember every inch of what we dragged you through.”

She sipped the soup. It was thin and salty, but it spread a small bloom of warmth down her throat and into her chest. She closed her eyes briefly, savoring it.

“How long…?” she began.

“Since you got here?” he finished for her. “About twelve hours. You were out most of the night. Your friend”—he jerked his chin toward the next cot, where Klara lay, wide awake and watching—“hasn’t taken her eyes off you.”

Lotte turned her head. Klara gave her a watery smile.

“You look terrible,” Klara said in German.

Lotte laughed, the sound rusty. “You too.”

The medic busied himself with a chart at the foot of the bed. “Your English isn’t bad,” he remarked to Lotte. “For someone who almost turned into a popsicle.”

“I study… before,” she said. “At school.”

“Well, keep practicing,” he said. “I think you’ve got a visitor.”

He nodded toward the doorway.

Jack stood there, cap in hand, hair damp from melted snow. He looked strangely out of place among the cots and bandages, his rifle conspicuously absent, his posture unsure.

Lotte’s heart did a small, surprising flip.

“You came,” she said, more statement than question.

“Told you I would,” he replied, stepping closer. “You look better.”

“That is not hard,” she said dryly. “I think even dead crow in snow look better than I did.”

He grinned. “I wouldn’t go that far. But you definitely had a sort of ‘haunted statue’ thing going.”

Klara watched the exchange with open curiosity, eyes flicking between them.

The medic clapped his hands lightly once. “All right, I’ll leave you lovebirds to it,” he said under his breath, too low for Lotte to catch the word, but not for Jack.

Jack’s ears turned a little red. “We’re not—” he began, but the medic was already moving on.

Lotte frowned slightly. “What is ‘lovebirds’?”

“Nothing,” Jack said quickly. “Just him being an idiot.”

She stared at him for a moment longer, then let it go. “How are… your men?” she asked. “The ones who almost fell. And the one with the bad jokes.” She struggled to remember his name. “Frank?”

“They’re okay,” Jack said. “Bruised, sore, pissed at the snow. Pretty much like the rest of us. Frank’s been telling anybody who’ll listen that he stared death in the face and told it a joke he stole from his uncle.”

Lotte smiled. The expression felt strange on her face, pulling at muscles that had been stuck in fear positions for too long.

“I am…glad,” she said. “That they are alright.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “MPs say we’ll be here a couple days,” he told her. “Storm’s blocked half the roads. After that, they’ll move you and the others back behind the lines. Proper POW camp. Less scenic snow, more fences.”

She nodded slowly. “I thought so.”

“We’ll… we’ll probably be assigned to escort again,” he added. “Or maybe not. Depends what command decides.”

“And then?” she asked.

“And then who knows?” he said with a shrug. “War’s winding down, they tell us. But the ground doesn’t feel it yet.”

She studied his face, committing it to memory—the line of his jaw, the way his eyes crinkled slightly at the corners when he smiled, the tiredness that lived behind his pupils.

“If we go,” she said quietly, “if we are moved… I may not see you again.”

He swallowed. “Maybe not,” he agreed. “But stranger things have happened. A month ago, if you’d told me I’d be hauling a German nurse through a blizzard like Santa’s sack, I would’ve told you you were crazy.”

She tilted her head. “Maybe we will meet again in peace,” she said. The word tasted unfamiliar on her tongue. “In a hospital without guns. You will need stitches for something stupid, and I will tell you it is your own fault.”

He laughed at that, a real, full sound that seemed to push back the chill a little. “That sounds about right,” he said. “I’m very good at stupid.”

They fell into a companionable silence. The church around them hummed with quiet activity—murmured conversations, the clink of metal basins, the crackle of the stove.

“Jack,” Lotte said slowly. “In the snow, Klara said, ‘They will leave us to freeze.’ It is what we… believed. Not because we think you… evil. But because war is… war.”

He nodded. “Nobody expects kindness from the other side,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t even expect it from our own.”

“You changed that story,” she said. “For us.”

He looked down, scuffing his boot against the stone floor. “Maybe we just started a new one.”

She reached for his hand impulsively, fingers closing around his. Her touch was still cool, but no longer terrifyingly numb.

“You should tell your brother,” she said.

The words surprised him. “My brother?”

“The one who lost his chance,” she said gently. “You give one to someone else. Maybe he would like to know.”

His throat tightened. For a moment he couldn’t speak.

“I’ll… do that,” he managed finally.

They sat like that for another few minutes—two people who had been told they were enemies, sharing the quiet between them.

Then Cole’s voice echoed from the doorway.

“Harlow. Time to move. Briefing in ten. MPs want to go over routes.”

Jack squeezed Lotte’s hand once before letting go. “Duty calls,” he said, attempting a lightness he didn’t quite feel.

She nodded, eyes shadowed but steady. “Go,” she said. “Do not make same mistake with snow twice.”

He chuckled. “I’ll try not to.”

He took a step away, then hesitated and turned back.

“Lotte?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m… glad we didn’t leave you,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Her smile was soft and small, but it reached her eyes. “Me too,” she said. “Now go, before your sergeant decides to leave you somewhere.”

He saluted her, half-mocking, half-sincere. Then he was gone, swallowed by the bustle of the church.

Lotte lay back against the thin pillow, listening to the storm outside slowly lose its fury. The wind still howled, but with a different tone now—less a roar, more a tired sigh.

She thought of the stories they had been told, of the monsters on the other side of the lines. She thought of Jack’s arms around her in the snow, of the rope pulling them all back from the edge of the drift.

“They will leave us to freeze,” the old story had gone.

Not always, she thought. Not this time.

Maybe, when this was over, she would tell a different story.

About snow, and ropes, and hands that held on even when it hurt.

---

Years later, when the war had become something people argued about in books and parades, when Saint-Aubin was once again just a name on a map that most people skipped over, Jack Harlow would sometimes wake in the middle of the night with the taste of snow in his mouth.

He would lie there, in a bed that was finally his and not the Army’s, listening to the quiet breathing of the world beyond his window. He would remember the weight of Lotte Bauer in his arms, the feel of the rope cutting into his palms, the moment when they had all chosen, as one, not to let go.

He never saw her again after they marched the prisoners out of Saint-Aubin two days later. Their column had been assigned to another sector, another set of roads and ruins and duties. Life moved on in its relentless, untidy way.

But he carried that blizzard with him, held it like a lesson written in ice.

When his children asked him, years later, what the war had been like, he did not talk first about battles or medals or maps with arrows on them. He talked about snow. About how cold could make strangers into something else—into fellow travelers, fellow survivors.

He told them, in simple words, about the day they’d almost left people behind and decided not to.

He did not mention all the times the world had made other choices. There were enough dark stories. Instead, he gave them this one small light.

“Did you ever meet her again?” his oldest daughter asked once, wide-eyed, when he finished the tale.

“No,” he said, and felt a small pang even then. “I didn’t.”

“Do you think she remembers you?” his son asked.

He thought of Lotte’s hand in his, her voice saying, You changed that story for us.

“I hope so,” he said.

In a town an ocean away, a woman with silver threading her blonde hair would sometimes sit by a window in winter and watch the snow fall.

Her children and grandchildren knew she had been a nurse in the war, that she had seen things she did not put into words. They knew she had spent time in camps, behind wire and watchtowers, that she had learned patience and silence like a second language.

They did not know that, for her, snow would never be only snow again.

When they asked, she told them about a march through a blizzard. About how the wind had tried to erase them. About an American soldier with tired eyes who had picked her up when she fell and refused to set her down again, even when his hands shook.

She told them, in her gentle, accented voice, that mercy could be a heavy thing. That sometimes it weighed as much as a human body carried through a storm. But that it was worth the burden.

“They say enemies cannot care for each other,” she would say. “They say we only hurt, never help. But I have felt different.”

She would look out at the snow, and somewhere in her memory, a rope would go taut again, and hands would grip and hold.

“If you ever meet someone they tell you is your enemy,” she would say to her grandchildren, “remember this: once, when it was so cold the world almost stopped, someone who should have let me die chose not to. And because of that, you are here.”

And in that way, the story travelled—across years, across borders, across the invisible lines people drew around themselves.

A story about American soldiers and German women prisoners.

A story about orders and fear and a choice made in the middle of a blizzard.

Not a story of leaving people to freeze, but of carrying them, step by painful step, toward whatever warmth could be found.

THE END