Even though this isn't the first episode of a new season of Combat, it marks a pivotal change in the show's history for me because it essentially acts as the dividing line between its more innocent early stages and its transition into a darker, more realistic war program. I say this for a few reasons (one of which I was very surprised to see in a show like this), but also because it's the first episode I can think of to feature blood. The episode starts with Lieutenant Hanley being left behind by Saunders and the others after he is wounded in a shell crater. Hanley plays dead and manages to elude the attention of passing German patrols while Saunders instructs Kirby and Caje to go look for him. Hanley eventually comes to a small house situated on the bank of a river. Almost being discovered by the germans, he is saved when the patrol looking for him engages Kirby and Caje instead. While the latter two fight off the germans, Hanley enters the house and finds a French woman named Annette (Denise Darcel) and her daughter Louise (Holly McIntire). The nearby germans are about to ignore the house until one of them notices Hanley's blood left on the door as he tried to turn the knob. The germans ask around but are unable to find Hanley. Before he leaves, a Wehrmacht soldier tauntingly makes Louise surrender her necklace to him. Shortly after, Hanley has his wound tended to by Annette (who doesn't speak English) and her daughter has to act as a translator between them. Annette is stuck in a frustrating situation because she wants to help Hanley, but with each passing moment he stays he increases his chances of being found. Hanley promises to leave right after Annette treats his wound, but the germans return and decide to camp in front of the house for quite a while this time, bringing up a truck to feed the infantry. Hanley is told to hide again, but the same german soldier who stole Louise's necklace earlier returns. He tries to sexually assault her after punching her mother out, so Hanley stabs him to death. Hanley tells Louise her mother will be ok, but they have to leave the house immediately because it's dark now and they can be a bit more reckless. Hanley and Louise sneak Annette out of a window (along with the soldier's rifle). On the way back to his squad, Hanley is almost captured by another german and forced to drop his weapon, but Louise knocks him out with a rock. Hanley is taken back to American lines where he meets with Saunders and the others. Before he's taken to hospital, Hanley tells the squad about how if they happen upon a nearby house by some water, the inhabitants are good people. While I thought the premise for this episode was a little too simple, I still enjoyed it because it has a much more barbaric feel than earlier installments. I really didn't expect to see an attempted rape in a Combat episode, but it does happen at one point. Hanley is a certified professional here as well, since he manages to stay undetected for quite a long time while there's basically a Nazi convention going on outside. While this episode is good because it's one of the few to feature Hanley much more than Vic Morrow, it does have some obvious weaknesses. For one thing, it's odd how every other french person in this show seems to speak english. If Louise didn't speak it, Hanley would simply be out of luck. Even after Louise says she only speaks a little bit of it, she's shown to understand nearly everything Hanley says to her. I also didn't really like how Hanley was laying down on a stretcher at the end, when just minutes earlier, he was walking around like it's nothing. Even with these mistakes, A Distant Drum still manages to be an entertaining episode of Combat, and even more so because the show's producers are now finally giving the germans actual german weapons, such as Gewehr 43's.
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