by John Harris
‘You can’t fight Germans with nothing but hatred,’ he said. ‘And that’s all you’ve got at the moment. You’re making up your minds to set about the best-trained army in Europe as if all it required was guns.’
‘We have guns.’
‘You don’t know how to use them.’
‘We should acquit ourselves well.’
‘The Germans would tear the place apart. It’s pride that’s behind all your talk, that’s all. You haven’t even got a leader and any outfit without a leader’s just rabble.’
‘We’ve got no one with experience.’
‘You’ve got Verdy de Clary.’
That old mothball!’ Reinach’s look was full of disgust. ‘All he does is sit at home, nursing his honour and looking at maps to explain why we were defeated in 1940.’
‘He knows what to do,’ Urquhart insisted.
‘We could never accept him.’
‘All right, then. Not him. It doesn’t have to be a soldier. Just someone who knows how to give orders and make everyone obey him.’
There was an awkward silence. Then Theyras gestured at Father Pol, who shook his head hurriedly.
‘I’m good at paters and aves’ he said. ‘But I’ve forgotten all I ever knew about fighting.’
‘Dréo?’
‘Holy Mother of Mary -’ the spiked moustaches seemed to give off sparks‘ - I have a wooden leg. I can’t even run across the road to avoid a horse and cart, let alone up a hillside or climb a tree. It must be someone young -’
Patrice de Frager sat up a little straighter, his expression hopeful. He could just see himself as a leader of men and a hero. There would probably be a ceremony outside Notre-Dame with General de Gaulle pinning on the medal.
‘- but not too young,’ Dréo went on, and de Frager’s face fell.
Neville lifted his head. He had been silent for a long time, still a little puzzled by Marie-Claude who suddenly seemed to have no eyes for him. The morning after Urquhart had failed to return from Rolandpoint, he had been dazed and awed by what had happened. There had been no argument, no pleading or persuasion, just a desperate longing for warmth and affection in both of them. It had left him thinking, in the uncomplicated manner of a boy, that there was nothing unexpected about it, that it was as normal as breathing and the natural outcome of their being together. But now, half in love, his eyes following her like a devoted dog’s, he was startled to find she had no time for him and seemed troubled, aloof and indifferent, as if she entirely rejected everything that had passed between them - even cold, not speaking and confining herself to bitter remarks addressed to Urquhart.
‘How about Reinach?’ he said. ‘He’s big enough to punch anyone in the mouth and knock out his teeth. They couldn’t knock his out in return, because he hasn’t got any. He cuts the timber the Germans want, he’s free to move about as he pleases, he talks to them. He goes to the chateau. He even has a lorry with petrol.’
Reinach frowned. ‘I’m forty-six!’
‘A perfect age,’ Dréo said. ‘Napoleon was in his prime at forty-six.’
‘When Napoleon was forty-six,’ Neville said dryly, ‘it was 1815 - the year of Waterloo.’
There was a long silence. ‘He had piles,’ Dréo growled. ‘You said so yourself. The English caught him when he wasn’t ready.’ He brushed the thought aside hurriedly. ‘It must be Reinach,’ he said.
There was a new eagerness in the room. Urquhart seemed to have put his finger on what was wrong.
‘Since we have the weapons,’ Reinach said, almost as though his new authority had taken hold of him at once, ‘we ought to learn how to use them. I know of people in Dijon and Besançon who’re in touch with the reséaux in the Doubs. We could send two men down there to learn how to use the rocket-launchers. They could then return here to teach us. Then when we get an agent in the district again, we could persuade him to let us have a parachute drop of our own.’
The others were all watching him eagerly, even de Frager.
‘I’ll go to Besancon,’ he said ‘The Germans ignore me. They think God was a German junker and they treat me differently because I have a title.’
‘Those Resistance chaps round Besancon are a rough lot.’ Reinach pointed out. ‘Communists, some of them.’
‘I can keep my mouth shut.’ It seemed it wasn’t only Reinach who was growing in stature. ‘Who else?’
‘Lionel Dring.’ Marie-Claude said quickly and Urquhart laughed out loud. Dring had been growing too possessive lately, and jealous of Neville, and she was eager to be rid of him. The realization that Urquhart knew what was in her mind irritated her and she found herself blushing.
By the following day, Reinach was beginning to take his leadership still more seriously, even swallowing his pride sufficiently to see Verdy de Clary. The old soldier’s manner was stiff and acid.
‘The war ended in 1940,’ he said. ‘I was told by my commander-in-chief to lay down my arms.’
‘Pétain!’ Reinach thumped his forehead with the flat of his hand in frustration. ‘That old stuffed dummy!’
Verdy’s eyes nickered to where his medals rested on velvet in a small glass case on his desk. ‘He’s not an adventurer,’ he snapped. ‘Not like de Gaulle who’s only a jumped-up brigadier-general who promoted himself overnight to head of the French nation. It’s stupid to fight when the odds are against you. No battle’s worth dying in when there’s no hope of final victory.’
‘What spirit!’ Reinach grated as he outlined to the others what had happened. ‘What courage! What cowardice!’
Urquhart, the regular soldier, disagreed. Army discipline, still strong in him, coloured his thinking and made his reactions instinctive.
‘Cowards don’t have a string of medals like he’s got,’ he pointed out.
That night the German-controlled French radio sounded nervous and twice as loud as normal with its warnings against resistance; the commentator, Jean-Hérold Paquis, urging strongly that the French people should throw in their lot with the Germans.
Madame Lamy pulled a face. ‘He’s another William Joyce, that one,’ she snorted. ‘Like Degrelle in Belgium and Quisling in Norway. No one listens to him.’
The BBC had also stepped up its urgings. ‘Watch the Germans,’ it said. ‘Find out when they come and go and where they go to. Pool your knowledge. Give information to none but known patriots.’
When Reinach returned from taking Dring and de Frager to Dijon, he was full of alarm. ‘All they could talk about down there,’ he said, ‘was the new weapons the Germans have. V-weapons, they call them.’ He grinned. ‘But at Besancon several kilometres of railway track have gone, with pylons twisted and engines upside down. The invasion must be coming. And this time we shall win because we have a myth. We have de Gaulle and Churchill. Who could make a myth of Daladier?’
‘Perhaps they’ll give you the Legion of Honour when it’s over,’ Madame Lamy murmured. ‘For talking.’
‘I’m not looking for medals,’ Reinach said hotly. ‘What we do’ll go into the history books as much as what the armies do, and if we don’t do anything, they’ll be nothing except under the heading, “Occupation”.’
There was a long silence then Guardian Moch twisted in his chair. ‘There’s a new agent in St Seigneur,’ he pointed out. ‘He’s come to take Arsène’s place. He can be found at a cafe called Le Petit Poucet. I could make contact.’
‘What would you ask for?’ Urquhart stopped them dead in their tracks.
‘What do we need?’
‘Rifles. Telescopic sights. Sten guns. Bren guns. Magazines. Ammunition.’
‘Perhaps also mortars, grenades and even land mines?’
Urquhart’s expression didn’t change. ‘Even rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons, field guns and, if you can get them, howitzers.’
‘We’re not conducting the defence of Paris,’ Reinach growled.
Urquhart was unmoved. ‘You could also start on the Rolandpoint weapons,’ he pointed out. �
��I could show you how to use them. I can strip, clean and reassemble anything you put in my hand. In the dark, if necessary.’
Reinach stared at Marie-Claude, then at Neville, then at Madame Lamy. His sarcasm had gone. ‘I think we should go to St Seigneur,’ he said.
Reinach’s lorry was ancient but he pushed it along as fast as its age would allow, rolling and lighting his cigarettes as he drove with the accelerator pedal pressed firmly down, while Urquhart and Guardian Moch bounced about like ping-pong balls in the back. To make the occasion seem more innocent, Marie-Claude, dressed in her best for shopping, had climbed into the cab with Reinach who wore a pair of wide green knickerbockers - what he called ‘les golfs’ - and pretended to make a heavy set at her.
As they dropped into the town, they saw few cars or lorries apart from those owned by Germans, collaborators or tradesmen employed by the Wehrmacht. Dilapidated horse carriages waited at the station, with two-wheeled basket trailers behind bicycles, and only a few gazogenes moved about the streets. The shops seemed to be full of rubbish passed off as luxuries, but decorated always with the tricolour of France as though it were patriotic to buy them. ‘Patrie, Honneur et Courage’ and Pétain’s watchwords, ‘Travaille, Famille, Patrie’, seemed to be heavily overworked.
The cafe to which Moch directed them had the usual zinc-topped bar beneath pictures of Pétain and Charles Trenet, the singer, with another of Hitler for good measure -pointedly hanging on the door of the lavatory. It was a depressing place, with walls thickly painted with mountain scenes and an iron stove by the bar where the proprietress was trying to boil a kettle on burning sawdust that filled the place with smoke.
There was a brief whispered conversation and the woman disappeared to return with a greasy-looking man wearing a blue smock and beret, a fag end hanging from the corner of his mouth.
‘He thinks he’s Jean Gabin,’ Marie-Claude whispered to Urquhart.
They all ceremoniously shook hands and ordered sausage stew. As they ate, the conversation remained inconsequential.
‘The Germans are losing the war,’ the man in the beret said. ‘It’s obvious from the bookstalls. They’ve got no sparkle any more, no ideas. Just the big German loudspeaker and the small Vichy loudspeaker yapping alongside.’
To Marie-Claude, writhing with impatience, it seemed they’d never get to the question of a message, but eventually Moch arrived at the point after a lot of cautious sparring. The agent was none too easy to convince but he finally nodded.
‘So long as you can vouch for all your people,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’
A slip of paper and a Carte Michelin changed hands, and Moch jabbed with his thumb. ‘That’s the field. Right there.’
The agent nodded. ‘We’ll arrange the co-ordinates and broadcast them. You’ll need a code - a phrase or a line of poetry. When it’s broadcast, that’s the night you’ll know you have to wait.’
‘They used La Fontaine last time,’ Marie-Claude said.
‘Then use him again. Do you know any?’
‘I know the one about the crow,’ Marie-Claude smiled. ‘Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché.’
‘I prefer the one about “La fourni n’est pas priteuse”‘ Reinach decided.
‘That’s the only one you know.’
The agent scowled. ‘Make up your minds,’ he said sharply.
The one about the crow,’ Marie-Claude insisted. That’s the one they used last year; they’ll know it’s us again.’
The agent scribbled the lines down. ‘Don’t miss them,’ he warned.
‘We’ll listen every night.’
The agent’s sour face twisted. ‘You needn’t bother,’ he said. They’ll only come at the time of a full moon.’
As he rose to leave, Marie-Claude put a hand on his arm, and Urquhart could see in her face all the desperate longing of France for liberation, for freedom, even just for hope. ‘Do you know anything about the invasion?’ she asked.
‘Why?’
‘If you do, for the love of God tell us!’
The agent took his cigarette end from his mouth. ‘I know nothing,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t tell me, anyway.’ He managed a twisted smile that was meant to be encouraging but looked as though it belonged to an undertaker sizing up a corpse. ‘I can tell you this, though,’ he ended. ‘It’s coming, all right.’
11
It was Tarnera who noticed the new spirit in the village. Something had happened to the place. It had been obvious for some time that one or two people had begun to have stirrings in their minds. Now it was as if they were all engaged in a vast conspiracy.
For safety the word had been passed round that the Germans were no longer to be talked to, in case some hint of what was in their minds was dropped. Even Hössenfelder, the orderly from the chateau, was discouraged from helping at the farm.
Like everyone else, Tarnera guessed that they were on the brink of something tremendous. It was deep into May now and he was well aware that for Germany events had reached the top of a steep slope down into the darkness and were already on the move again. It was clear the tide had turned and that eventually they were going to lose the war. The U-boats had been beaten and the Luftwaffe was broken. The Russians had smashed the Wehrmacht in the East, and even in the Pacific and Burma the allies were beginning to sweep everything before them.
Then they heard that Cassino, which had been holding up the allied armies in Italy, had fallen and it didn’t escape Tarneta’s notice that the place wasn’t just another stronghold but part of the battle for the Italian capital.
‘In case you haven’t realized it, Fritzi,’ he said to Klein-Wuttig, ‘we’ve just entered on a new phase.’
Busy at the table, Klein-Wuttig looked up. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Rome will fall before long.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘I’m glad you think so. I even hope you’re right.’
‘There’s nothing to fear.’ Klein-Wuttig was armoured by his faith. ‘Hitler ist der Sieg. The Führer is Victory itself.’
Tarnera laughed. ‘Fritzi, you’re an incurable optimist. You know the current joke in Berlin: They stuck a notice outside an old folk’s home - “Closed. Due to Call-up.” Men of sixty-five are being called into the Volkssturm, Fritzi. Mind you, they say you’re exempt if you can prove you have a father serving at the front.’
Klein-Wuttig’s expression was frozen on his face. ‘You think the war’s a joke, Tamera, don’t you?’
‘If I didn’t I’d have cut my throat long since! Fritzi, the Russians are heading now for Kiev.’
‘Der Endsieg wird kommen. Final victory will be ours, never fear.’
‘Fritzi -’ Tarnera sighed ‘ - those airy sunlit homes they promised us; they’re all over the Reich now - thanks to the RAF. And do you remember the days when we were going to sweep up the British Isles with a vacuum cleaner? What happened to that? If a referendum were held now to end the war, there’d be a hundred and twenty per cent vote, the odd twenty per cent voting twice. You’re beginning to regard the war as an end in itself, irrespective of whether it can be won. Alles klappt. Everything’s ticking over. We haven’t lost, so everything’s fine. Anybody with half an eye can see the way things are going. That nonsense about one folk, one Reich one Führer only papers over the cracks. There’s no direction any more. The Party stalwarts have boozed away what grey matter they had.’
‘The Führer will make things come right.’
Klein-Wuttig spoke doggedly and Tamera threw up his hands. ‘Oh, God, Fritzi, all this Hitler worship’s just Catholicism without Christ!’
Klein-Wuttig stared stonily at him then he gathered up his belt and cap and strode to the door. As he opened it, he turned and jerked out his arm defiantly. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he shouted.
‘Oh, go to the devil!’
As Klein-Wuttig disappeared, Klemens arrived.
‘What was all that about?’ he demanded.
‘Only Fritzi insisting that we can�
��t lose the war.’
Klemens frowned. ‘Of course we can’t,’ he said. ‘‘We started it and now we’re stuck with it and we might as well enjoy it because the peace will be terrible.’ As he tossed down his hat and whip, he stood for a moment, staring at a picture near the door. It showed a village street and seemed to have been painted entirely in the left-over browns and greens of a one-armed house decorator.
He frowned and gestured at it. ‘Those paintings we’re after,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t have painted over them, could they? I mean, could that be one? I’ve heard of that sort of thing being done by shady dealers. They scrape it off afterwards or something.’
Tarnera smiled. ‘I’ve checked, Herr Oberst. That paint’s years old. You’d never scrape it off.’
Klemens scowled. He also had begun to notice the new spirit in the village and it worried him because sabotage was rife all over France. Despite everything, the French were still managing to urinate into the petrol tanks of lorries, and concrete bastions along the coast were said to be rotten because French labourers had discovered that sugar dropped into a concrete mixer formed calcium saccharate which robbed the concrete of its strength.
None of this, of course, applied to the district of Néry-St Seigneur-Rolandpoint, which had been stiff with Germans since 1940, but it didn’t mean that the villagers weren’t scheming. He was no fool and was as conscious as Tamera that time was running out. Apolitical himself, he was none the less aware that when Armageddon came, it would be well worth his while to have stacked away against the future everything he could find, and it bothered him that he was sitting on a set of art treasures that no one had yet thought to remove.
‘That inventory I asked for,’ he said. ‘Is it ready?’
Tamera fished in his briefcase and produced a thick folio of papers, which he passed over together with a signal flimsy. ‘I’ve also tracked down Colonel Marx,’ he said. ‘That’s his reply.’
Klemens snatched at the signal and stared at it. ‘So much for that damned old woman!’ he said. ‘Well, I’ve got something too! Let’s have the old witch in.’