Army of Shadows

by John Harris

  ‘You are not English, then?’

  ‘Yes. I’m English.’

  ‘But you have the Scottish name.’

  ‘I’m still English.’

  Father Pol looked at Madame Lamy and it was quite clear they were mentally touching their temples to each other.

  Neville tried to express thanks for their rescue. ‘We thought when we heard you talking to the Germans,’ he said. ‘that you were a collaborator.’

  ‘Not me.’ Father Pol’s heavy shoulders rose in a shrug. ‘But it’s also pointless sticking out one’s neck to get a martyr’s crown; especially with the church calendar already crowded.’

  He accepted the coffee Marie-Claude brought and lit his pipe to fill the room with clouds of acrid smoke. ‘We suffer badly with the Germans stealing all the fats and greases we need,’ he said, ‘but history’s full of nations defying God and prospering, so we must bow before His will and endure.’

  He took a sip of coffee, extending his lips and sucking it up as if he were a vacuum cleaner. ‘It’s a matter of attitudes,’ he went on. ‘Father Xavier at Rolandpoint abuses them at mass every Sunday, yet he survives.’ He shook his head. ‘I think the Holy Ghost is working overtime for him, and I prefer myself not to demand too much of the Lord. I’ll wait until the odds change a little.’

  He took another noisy sip of coffee. ‘I was at Verdun as a young man, you see,’ he said. ‘And there was so much dying there for nothing, I decided that when one has to die, it must be for something worth while.’

  As they talked five other men arrived, one of them Reinach. They all wore stiff black suits as though they were being interviewed for a new job and they appeared one after the other, with discreet intervals between them, riding down the muddy farm road on ancient bicycles with threadbare tyres; one without tyres at all and clattering like a set of old tin cans. As they gathered in embarrassed silence round the bed like mourners at a wake, Marie-Claude produced glasses and they began to introduce themselves, carefully avoiding looking at the drinks as though there were a secret agreement not to.

  ‘Thomas Dréo, smith.’ The first one was a straight, solid elderly man like a rock, with a creaking artificial leg. He had black eyes that flashed brimstone and spiked moustaches so aggressive they seemed to throw off sparks. ‘Late sergeant of the 17th Alpine Regiment. I fought against the Germans in the last war and would have fought against them in this if they’d let me, in spite of my age and my leg.’

  ‘He has the Medaille Militaire for extraordinary valour,’ Reinach pointed out. ‘As well as the Croix de Guerre and several citations.’

  Dréo shrugged. ‘It was nothing. It was expected of me My father also lost a leg - at Belfort in 1870, when it was the only city in France to withstand the Prussians.’

  ‘Under Denfert-Rochereau,’ Neville said and Dréo’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Oh, mon dieu,’ he crowed. ‘We have a historian of France among us.’

  Reinach shrugged. ‘The English aren’t bad,’ he observed. ‘Some are even quite likeable.’

  Dréo warmed to his theme. ‘My grandfather fought in Algeria and my great-grandfather at Waterloo, and my son fought in this war and lost a leg at Sedan in 1940. Although we have only two legs between us, we run the forge and make a business of sorts collecting scrap.’

  The diatribe looked like going on all day but Reinach pulled one of the other men forward.

  ‘Théyras, Maurice.’ he said. ‘Mason.’

  The mason was a prematurely old man with a wry smile and a hump back. ‘I have no military service because of my back, but it doesn’t stop me having feelings. I’ve finished the wall. They’ll never find our pictures now.’

  Reinach pushed him away before he could get too involved and pulled another man forward. Casimir Ernouf had the shoulders of an ox, pale blue eyes and fair hair so that he looked almost German. ‘I am the quarryman,’ he said. ‘When the German filth allow me to work.’

  ‘And I am Reinach,’ the carpenter said, pushing him aside. ‘Because Alsace was occupied in 1870, my service did not start until it was liberated in 1918.I speak German because I am Alsatian, French because I am French, and Polish because when France went to the aid of Poland in 1919,I went there to finish my army service. In addition to working with wood, I am also a mechanic - and I own a charcoal business which I bought when it was bankrupt because it allows me the legal use of a lorry for which I have a police pass. I live by Système D - by my wits - and believe firmly in le sang-froid. I have no teeth because the Germans knocked them out with a rifle when they first arrived in 1940, and I don’t wear false ones so that I shall remember what they did every time I eat.’

  Despite his cheerfulness and empty clown’s grin, there was a whole well of hatred beneath Reinach’s words. He gestured at the fifth man, a miniature human being with a sly darting glance, who had arrived carrying a brief-case and wearing a black homburg that looked far too large for him. This ordure,’ he said, ‘is Emile-Auguste Moch.’

  ‘With no service,’ Moch said.

  ‘He calls himself a commercial traveller but he’s really in the black market and everything he does is either illegal or dangerous. He has a petrolette, which is a small motor bike, and we call him the Gardien du Fond, because his house is deep in the Fond St Amarin, which leads out of the village towards Belfort, and because ‘fond’ also means ‘oddments’. In addition to bringing information about the Germans, you see, he looks after our needs with odds and ends from the black market. So far he’s not been caught’

  No one had yet looked at their glasses. Then, as Madame Lamy drank, everyone else drank, too, as though a signal had run round the room. Father Pol smiled.

  They do say,’ he observed with satisfaction, ‘that the spirit we distil here can be used in a blow torch.’ He gestured and a great waft of body odour came across. ‘We are Néry’s council of war.’

  ‘Here to do what?’ Urquhart asked quietly.

  ‘We are the Resistance,’ Dréo said. ‘We wish to decide whether you’re shot-down fliers or Gestapo agents. The Gestapo is up to all the tricks.’

  ‘They look like airmen to me,’ Reinach commented.

  Dréo gestured. ‘We have to be sure.’

  Reinach grinned. ‘Well, they’re certainly not French. No self-respecting Frenchman would say he was English. But they can’t be German, because they’re far too intelligent.’

  ‘If they are English,’ Moch said, ‘they’ll be able to tell us how to bowl a maiden over and what is the silly mid-on. The agent at Rolandpoint gave me this question because no German would know the answer.’

  It seemed a strange way of deciding their nationality, and there was a surprising levity about the conversation, but Urquhart realized that running beneath it there was a shrewd thread of enquiry that was barely detectable. When they seemed satisfied they changed the subject to the invasion.

  ‘When will it take place?’ Théyras asked.

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘They can’t be English,’ Ernouf said at once.

  ‘It can’t be long,’ Father Pol pointed out. ‘The General Montgomery has returned to lead the Eighth Army. He is Norman, of course, that one. French, like Winston Churchill.’

  They seemed settled for a long discussion, standing around the bed, sombre and black, in a way that reminded Neville of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’, and Marie-Claude sighed and went none too willingly for the bottle to refill their glasses. Théyras leaned over to Neville.

  ‘That’s a good girl, that one,’ he whispered. ‘And did you ever see such buttocks?’

  As Marie-Claude returned, Neville found himself eyeing her approvingly, deciding she’d probably been better educated, with more straightforwardness, more politics, more Shakespeare and more knowlege of sex. than any English girl of comparable age.

  ‘The British Broadcasting spoke again yesterday.’ Théyras started the discussion once more. ‘ ‘The Germans believe in overwhelming force,’ they said. ‘Soon t
hey will know what overwhelming force is.’ I liked that. It was clever.’

  Reinach seemed more interested in events nearer home. ‘The Germans have taken over the château,’ he announced.

  ‘What are they like?’

  ‘Like Germans. The Baronne tells me the colonel’s already looking for the paintings. He’s fat and blond, and the back of his neck has short hairs on it like a pig’s.’

  ‘There was a little of God’s grace in one of the last lot,’ Father Pol observed quietly. ‘There’s another with these -a Catholic from the Rhine. He’s been already to ask if he might receive Confession.’

  ‘You said ‘no’, of course,’ Madame Lamy said.

  ‘I said ‘yes’,’ Father Pol snapped. ‘I was sent here by ecclesiastical authority, and until ecclesiastical authority sees fit to remove me, no one asking God’s mercy will find me wanting. In the eyes of God, he’s one of His subjects.’ He stared defiantly at Madame Lamy who glared back at him, quite willing to give as good as she got. He turned to Urquhart. ‘Are you of the faith, my son, or do you follow that chilly English dogma that’s a cross between Catholicism and bastardized Lutheranism?’

  I’m a Catholic,’ Urquhart said.

  ‘And do you go to church?’

  ‘Not very often.’ Urquhart had never suffered from self-doubt and never permitted himself to be questioned about what he did. It was typical of him that he had no nickname and had always remained ‘Urquhart’ and nothing else to his friends.

  Théyras interrupted. ‘Perhaps your German friend. Father, has some suggestions as to how we might get rid of them.’

  Reinach shrugged. There are so damned many we should turn the place into a spa and make money. Germans like spas, and we’ve only to bury some good German bodies in the stream where it comes down from the bills to give it the proper flavour.’

  ‘It isn’t a joke,’ Dréo snapped.

  ‘Who said it was?’ Reinach snapped back.

  Urquhart and Neville eyed each other, faintly embarrassed. The discussion had started so proudly but the pride was obviously only a screen for tension and edgy nerves; a striving for defiance that was betrayed by every word that was spoken as strain and the suffering of the Occupation.

  There was a long silence then Dréo spoke. ‘Every Frenchman feels the need to wipe out the shame of 1940, you understand,’ he explained stiffly. ‘We had bad leaders.’

  ‘That’s what everybody says,’ Marie-Claude joined in. ‘We’re good at explaining. That’s all we do - talk. We French talk too much.’

  Dréo shifted uneasily. ‘At Rolandpoint they’re ready for anything,’ he growled. They once cut the railway lines from the forest to St Seigneur.’

  Reinach shrugged. ‘And for that pleasure,’ he said, ‘fifteen men were shot. To me it didn’t seem worth while, especially as they repaired it within a day.’

  Dréo wasn’t put off. ‘They have an arbalette, a rocket-launcher for destroying tanks. They got it from London by parachute. They also have a transmitter and an allied agent called Arsène who visits them.’

  ‘So I heard.’ Father Pol frowned. ‘And if I have heard, then probably the Germans have also heard.’

  Dréo was still pursuing his theme. ‘We have guns too,’ he said. ‘And I have my old Laurelline.’

  ‘A recuperated fusil-mitrailleuse from the last war, smuggled home and hidden under the floor of the forge.’

  ‘She is spotlessly clean. She could still kill Germans.’

  ‘It’s not enough,’ Reinach said. ‘Apart from that, all we have are a Sten gun given us by the Rolandpoint reseau, three revolvers, two Belgian automatic pistols, two old Lébels from 1918 and a few hand grenades which someone left outside until they were rusty. We are humiliated.’

  Then spit,’ Marie-Claude’s mother snapped. ‘I am a good spitter. It is good for the juices.’

  Father Pol drew a deep breath. ‘France does not stand alone,’ he pointed out. ‘De Gaulle said she didn’t. ‘The flames of French resistance must not and shall not die,’ he said.’

  They nearly have,’ Madame Lamy snapped. ‘Of course Elsie wags her tail for Winston Churchill and growls when Hitler’s mentioned. But that doesn’t get us far. All we have left are young boys.’

  ‘Who don’t know how to fight.’ Marie-Claude frowned. This isn’t a big place. It’s not a pretty place or well known. We have a window in the church dating back to Henri IV and a few fine carved statues in the frieze over the altar. But the church bells have been stolen to make guns and we have nothing that’s beautiful so that even the tourists never come here. We have two bars - one since the Germans closed one down - two grocers with no groceries, a butcher with no meat, a post office and a mairie. We’re not famous or clever or brave. Sergeant Dréo’s got a wooden leg and so has his son, and probably his grandson will eventually have one, too, because they seem to run in the family. Mère Ledoux’s barman. Vic, slips into the wood with Chrystalline Gaudin, Dr Mouillet supports a mistress in Bourg-la-Chattel and the Baron is just a posturing boy. We have four farms, two good, mine very bad. Hyacinthe Reinach’s a scoundrel. Father Pol’s sometimes a bore and I am badly in need of a man about the place. Who are we to take on the Germans?’

  There was a long affronted silence, then Father Pol shrugged. ‘We can’t take on a German army that isn’t defeated,’ he said. ‘We all saw them arrive. They were dusty and dirty but they were singing. They sang magnificently. They came as conquerors and that was what they were. That’s what they still are - despite North Africa and Russia. When they came here, I saw Commandant Verdy de Clary weeping, despite the rosette of the Legion of Honour he wore. He was weeping for things he wasn’t strong enough to stop. We’re still not strong enough. We just have to be patient’

  Colonel Klemens at the Chateau de Frager was also trying to be patient. Outside, rain drummed against the windows and his small eyes glittered and his hand strayed to the back of his head to scratch at the short gingery hairs there that so annoyed Reinach. Behind him stood Tamera, while Klein-Wuttig sat at the table. In front of them the Baronne and Balmaceda waited.

  ‘You’re an artist, monsieur,’ Klemens was saying slowly, gesturing at the painting over the fireplace. ‘Would you say that was valuable?’

  Balmaceda shrugged. ‘Well, yes and no,’ be began.

  ‘Yes or no!’ Klein-Wuttig snapped and the barked word seemed to make him jump in his seat. ‘Answer properly!’

  Balmaceda’s frightened eyes lifted. ‘It’s hard to say, monsieur.’

  ‘I don’t expect exactitude,’ Klemens said gently. ‘What is its value? Great or small?’

  ‘Not great. Not small. It’s by an unknown artist, but the painting is skilful, the style has merit. The colours are good.’

  ‘How old is it?’

  ‘Last century, monsieur.’

  ‘Who was the artist?’

  ‘A Dijonnais by the name of Wemille.’

  Klemens’ head turned. ‘Ever heard of this Wemille, Tamera?’ he demanded.

  Captain Tamera shrugged and Klemens strode across the room and gestured with his crop at another painting. ‘How about that one? Valuable?’

  Balmaceda gestured. ‘I’m an old man now, monsieur. I don’t know much about -’

  ‘I know who you are!’ Klemens said more sharply. ‘I’ve looked you up. You were a dealer in Paris and a copyist of skill. You’ve spent a great deal of time in galleries and you know the masters. Give me a proper answer.’

  Balmaceda’s thin body tautened. ‘Little value, monsieur. Late-nineteenth-century artist - Jeannot Monjaret.’

  Signing to them to follow, Klemens strode through the house, through the dining room and the hall, up the stairs and to the bedrooms, jerking his crop again and again at the pictures on the walls. ‘How about that one?’ he demanded. ‘And that?’

  Balmaceda’s distress was growing. ‘Last century, monsieur. George-Marie Planel. No great value.’

  ‘That?’

  ‘Pi
erre-Jean-Hubert Loupias. No value. An unknown, monsieur.’

  When they’d seen every painting in the house, Klemens began to go round the furnishings. Balmaceda’s replies remained depressingly the same and after a while Klemens dismissed the old people and turned to the two officers.

  ‘There’s something damned funny going on here,’ he said. ‘When I was in Torce-en-Vallee, my commanding officer was Colonel Dannhüber. He knows about paintings and he had a major on his staff called Kaspar, who used to be curator of the Stadtmuseum in Hamburg. They came through here in 1940 and Dannhüber once told me to keep an eye open for the paintings. He mentioned a Corot, I remember, a Prud’hon, and a Fragonard, as well as Troyons, Daubignys and a few others.’ His voice rose. ‘Well, I am keeping my eyes open. And I’m seeing nothing!’

  Tarnera’s dark intelligent eyes contained a hint of amusement. ‘Perhaps they’ve been stolen, Herr Oberst,’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps Colonel Dannhüber -’

  ‘Colonel Dannhüber’s just arrived in Dijon,’ Klemens snapped. ‘He’s now General Dannhüber, and Major Kaspar is Colonel Kaspar. If they’d taken the paintings I’d have heard of it.’

  ‘Then perhaps Reichsmarschall Goering’s been helping himself. National Socialism’s been a good excuse to grab most of the world’s treasures.’

  Klein-Wuttig’s eyes snapped up. ‘One day, Tarnera,’ he barked, ‘your tongue’ll lose you your head. Some people mind about that sort of talk.’

  Tarnera refused to be put off. ‘It’s more than likely, all the same. I hear that his ante-chamber’s knee-deep with fraudulent dealers all trying to tread each other underfoot to sell him something. Pictures would go well with his jewels and Roman togas.’

  Klemens slapped at his boots with his crop. ‘Find out, Tarnera,’ he said.

  Tarnera’s jaw dropped. ‘Find out, Herr Oberst?’

  ‘Exactly. Find out. It’s public knowledge what Goering has at Karinhall. He’s boasted about it often enough. Very well, try a few of his friends. You’re an ex-newspaperman with contacts at the ministry. Find out.’