Christmas Miracles by Brad Steiger Read Free Book Online Page A

was greatly appreciated.
    They had just finished a sparse, but somehow comforting and filling meal, when one of the men started tapping his fork on his metal mess kit.
    â€œFellas,” he said, when he had everyone’s attention. “Do you know what today is?”
    â€œDon’t tell us it’s your birthday, Skeeter,” Potter said with a sigh of mock disappointment. “I am so sorry, I wasn’t able to go shopping for a present. Every time I did try to go into town to buy something, those nasty Nazis started shooting at me.”
    â€œCan it, Potter,” his buddy replied. “It’s the eve of the birthday of someone a whole lot more important than this dogface GI.”
    And then the realization seemed to strike everyone in the crowded kitchen at the same time. It was Christmas Eve.
    â€œFor several moments, the room was silenced as we all became lost in our own thoughts of Christmas back home,” Potter said.
    â€œWe were all somewhere else in time and space. Some of us were probably remembering a special Christmas Eve at home with Mom and Dad, sitting around the dining room table after a big meal, listening to Bing Crosby sing ‘White Christmas’ on the radio, all of the kids just waiting to tear into the presents under the tree. Or the last Christmas that we held our wives or sweethearts in our arms before we enlisted. We all wanted to be back home with our loved ones, not crowded into some German farmer’s deserted home with the enemy all around us.”
    One of the men shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden bench, then spoke up before he lost his nerve. “I think we should do something to observe Christmas Eve—you know, like singing a Christmas hymn. Something like ‘Silent Night’ or ‘Little Town of Bethlehem.’ ”
    â€œIf he had been expecting ridicule from the hardened, tough men around him, he received none that cold and lonely Christmas Eve far away from our homes,” Potter recalled. “Softly at first, as some of us struggled to remember the words, we began singing ‘Silent Night.’ Then as we got more into the spirit of the hymn, our voices became stronger and stronger until the rafters of that old farmhouse were reverberating. By the time we got to the third verse, most of us were just humming along, but even that had a good Christmas sound to it.”
    Then, suddenly, someone carrying a bright light slammed open the kitchen door and shouted: “Everyone out! A mortar shell is about to hit!”
    Potter and his buddies scrambled for the door, ran several yards, then threw themselves headlong on the frozen, snow-packed German terrain.
    Seconds later, the demolished farmhouse erupted in a fiery explosion and began to rain pieces of brick down on them. Nazi mortar fire had scored a direct hit on their temporary sanctuary.
    â€œIt was a good thing for us that even though we were bone-tired, we simply reacted on our training and our war-honed instincts,” Potter said. “None of us thought to stop to ask the stranger with the bright light just how he knew that a mortar shell was about to hit the specific target of our particular farmhouse.
    â€œWhoever the guy was, he didn’t burst in among us and shout, ‘Heads up! The Jerries are going to start shelling!’ He told us to get out because a round was about to hit us. That statement required special and specific knowledge, and if any of us had stopped to interrogate the fellow concerning the source of such intelligence, none of us would have survived the direct hit.”
    Potter and his buddies spent the rest of the night in the ruins of a barn, huddled around a sheltered fire. One of the men commented that Christmas Eve was the perfect night to sleep on a pile of straw near mangers and cattle pens.
    â€œLater, when some of us had a chance to talk about the incident, a couple of the guys were already calling it a miracle,” Potter