Story title: Biscuits and Mercy

Camp Somewhere in the American Midwest
Late 1944

The first thing they noticed was the smell.

It wasn’t the sharp sting of disinfectant or the sour tang of boiled cabbage they were used to in barracks across Europe. It was warm, heavy, almost… comforting. Something rich and buttery hanging in the air, threaded with black pepper and the faint echo of coffee.

Greta stopped just inside the mess hall door and stared.

So did the rest of the women.

The room buzzed with noise—metal trays clattering, benches scraping, American voices overlapping in an easy, careless way that sounded like a foreign language even when it wasn’t. Soldiers in olive-drab uniforms were finishing their breakfast, leaning over plates piled with food.

Real food.

Greta swallowed.

For weeks, aboard the transport ship from North Africa to America, they had eaten thin soup and bread so hard it could blunt a knife. Before that, on the retreat, they’d shared crusts and cold potatoes, pretending they were full.

Now, on the long wooden counter, there were trays of things she barely recognized.

Scrumbled eggs, yellow and soft.

Strips of meat that crackled at the edges.

Some kind of porridge steaming in big metal tubs.

And on a side table, a sheet pan of strange, pale mounds covered in a thick white sauce, flecked with black.

She frowned.

“What is that?” whispered Lotte at her elbow.

“I don’t know,” Greta whispered back. “Maybe… dessert?”

Dessert for breakfast felt like the sort of luxury that existed only in stories.

The Americans filed out, laughing, wiping their mouths, some nodding at the cluster of German women standing in the doorway in their prisoner uniforms.

A sergeant waved a hand.

“Ladies,” he called, “come on in. Chow’s still hot.”

The interpreter beside him repeated the gist in German.

One of the women—Ilse, who’d been a clerk in a signals unit before being captured in Tunisia—took a small step forward.

She lifted her chin.

“Are we… allowed to have the leftovers?” she asked in careful English, the last word catching in her throat.

The sergeant blinked.

Then smiled.

“Sure,” he said. “You’ll probably like it.”

He said it so casually that Greta almost laughed.

Like it.

As if liking or not liking food had mattered to them in years.

They moved toward the line, hesitantly at first, like people expecting someone to yank everything away and shout it was all a mistake.

No one did.

The cook behind the counter was a big man with a sunburned face and arms like hams. He wore an apron smeared with flour and a grin that was all teeth.

“Morning, ma’am,” he said as each woman approached, ladling scoops onto trays. “Here you go. Biscuits and gravy. Stick to your ribs.”

The interpreter struggled with “biscuits and gravy” and finally just shrugged.

“Brot… mit Sauce,” he said. Bread with sauce.

Greta watched a portion slide onto her own tray—two rounds of something like bread, but softer, split open and smothered in a thick, creamy sauce studded with little pieces of pinkish meat and black pepper.

She’d never seen anything like it.

“Is this… süß?” asked Lotte. “Sweet?”

Greta didn’t know.

She glanced at the guard next to her.

“Is this… Nachtisch?” she ventured. Dessert?

He barked a laugh.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “That’s breakfast.”

Breakfast.

She carried the tray to a table near the back, hands steady out of sheer will. The other women sat with her, each staring at their plates as if the food might evaporate.

Up close, the biscuits were warm in a way she could feel through the metal tray. The gravy smelled of pepper and something savory she couldn’t quite place.

“Schau,” Ilse whispered, poking hers gently with a fork. “It’s soft.”

Greta cut off a small piece, watching the sauce cling to the edges.

Her stomach twisted—not in hunger, but in a strange mix of longing and suspicion. There had to be a catch. Nothing this generous came without one.

All her life, food had been something counted, weighed, measured. Even before the war, her mother had sliced bread with a precision born of habit.

In the last years, it had been rations on ration cards, soup stretched with water, meals eaten with one eye on the clock and the other on the door.

Now she had a plate full of something new and strange and impossible.

“Go on,” Lotte urged. “Try it. If it kills you, I’ll have your blanket.”

Greta snorted despite herself.

She lifted the fork.

The first bite was small.

She hesitated halfway, then closed her lips around it.

The biscuit gave way with hardly any resistance—soft, flaky, a texture she didn’t have a word for. The gravy was hot, salty, with a fat comfort that spread across her tongue and down her throat.

Sausage.

That was the flavor she couldn’t place.

Her eyes stung suddenly.

She forced herself to chew. To swallow. To breathe.

Across the table, Ilse’s eyebrows shot up.

“It’s… good,” she said, surprised. “So… reich.” Rich.

One of the older women, Marta, had tears running down her cheeks as she ate, wiping them away angrily with the back of her hand.

For a few seconds, the table fell silent except for the sound of forks and the occasional, involuntary little noise people made when they ate something that hit every empty place at once.

First bites were cautious.

Second bites less so.

By the third, there was no caution left—only hunger they’d been pretending not to have, ignited by warmth and fat and the realization that no one was snatching the plate away.

Greta finished her portion and stared at the empty metal tray.

Her stomach felt both fuller and hungrier at the same time, like it had just remembered what it was for.

She glanced toward the serving line.

The pan of biscuits was still half-full.

The cook was wiping his hands on a towel, humming.

She swallowed.

“Go,” whispered Lotte. “Ask.”

Greta’s heart hammered harder than it had in any air raid.

She stood, carried her tray back up, and cleared her throat.

“Entschuldigung,” she said. “Please… may I… have… a little more?”

The cook looked at her, at the empty tray, at her face.

“Sure thing,” he said easily. “We got plenty.”

He slid another biscuit onto her tray, drowned it in gravy.

“Eat up,” he added. “Can’t have you all blowing away in the first stiff wind.”

As she walked back, she felt the other women watching her.

Cautious, curious, fingers tightening around their own trays.

Within minutes, two more rose and lined up behind her.

“Excuse us,” one said, eyes down. “Could we also…?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the cook said. “That’s what it’s there for.”

He didn’t look like a man punishing enemies.

He looked like a man feeding people.

Greta sat down again and ate more slowly this time, letting herself taste instead of just consume.

Crisp edges on the sausage. The way the pepper hit the back of her throat. The way the biscuit, for all its weird softness, felt like something solid under the sauce.

It made her think of mornings before all this, when her mother would slice thick rye bread and spread it with butter and jam, and the house would smell of coffee and warm bread and safety.

The biscuit didn’t taste like those mornings.

But it carried the same weight.

Safety.

Or at least the absence of immediate threat.

She set her fork down and looked around the hall.

American soldiers were finishing up, some watching them with half-smiles, some not paying attention at all, more interested in arguing about baseball.

One of the guards caught her eye.

He raised his coffee cup in a little salute.

She didn’t know what to do, so she nodded back.

Later, when she thought about this day—and she would, more than she expected—even after she returned to Germany, even after she had a kitchen of her own again, with a stove that worked and a pantry with more than two jars in it—she wouldn’t remember the exact taste of the biscuits and gravy.

Memory would blur the specifics.

What she would remember was the feeling.

Of a plate set in front of her without suspicion.

Of being told “Sure, have more,” without a ledger coming out.

Of the way warmth spread through her chest that had nothing to do with sausage fat and everything to do with the quiet, shocking realization:

They don’t hate us.

Not in the way she’d been told they would.

Not in the way posters had screamed about.

Compassion, she’d learn, was not the opposite of justice.

Sometimes, it was the sharpest weapon against the lies she’d grown up in.

Because nothing cracked propaganda faster than an enemy handing you a second helping and saying, “Eat. You look like you need it.”

Years later, sitting at a table in a small rebuilt German town, she would tell her grandchildren about America.

About the big skies and the endless trains and the way the guards had laughed.

And, inevitably, about the first time she’d seen white sauce poured over bread.

“That was your first American meal?” one of the children would ask, wrinkling their nose.

“Not the first,” she’d say. “But the first I will never forget.”

“Was it really that good?” another would ask skeptically.

She’d smile.

“It was not just the food,” she’d tell them. “It was what it meant.”

And if they pressed her to explain, she’d say:

“It meant I was still a person.”

Sometimes history is artillery maps and surrender papers.

Sometimes it’s a plate of biscuits and gravy offered to people who expected a fist.

Both, in the end, change the world.

Just on different scales.