by John Harris
It was an uncertain day, broken only by the news that the Vercors cell had at last been attacked by elements of three Wehrmacht divisions with air support. It was an even more uneasy night, and Klemens slept badly, dreaming that French Communists and German Gestapo were coming through the window. There was no mention of any assassination in the next morning’s papers and until noon the Germans and the French in Néry, all of them well aware of what had happened, were eyeing each other cautiously for a sign of weakness.
Late in the afternoon, Klemens was holding a signal from Dijon on which several words stood out ‘. . . it is recommended that nothing should be done until the situation can be assessed...’ when the radio came to life.
The harsh voice made him jump. ‘If I speak to you today,’ it said, ‘it is first in order that you should hear my voice and know that I am unhurt and well, and secondly, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history ., ,’
‘He doesn’t sound very dead,’ Tarnera said flatly.
‘. . . The bomb,’ the harsh voice went on, Was placed by Colonel Count von Stauffenberg. It exploded two metres to my right. One of those with me has died. A number of colleagues very dear to me were very severely injured. I myself sustained only very minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard this as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence...’
They heard him out in silence and the angry voice went on to order that no one, from private to field marshal, should obey any orders passed out in the name of the conspirators.
‘... It is everyone’s duty to arrest, or if they resist, to kill at sight anyone issuing or handling any such orders.’
Klemens dropped the signal he was holding as if it were red-hot, his heart shrivelling as details were given of the round-up and execution of the conspirators.
As the radio stopped, Klein-Wuttig appeared and tossed his hat on to the table. ‘They’ve brought gliders in,’ he said.
Klemens’ head jerked up. ‘What the devil for? I thought they’d caught them all.’
‘All who?’
‘The conspirators.’
‘Oh, that!’ Klein-Wuttig shrugged. That’s finished, Herr Oberst. I heard it down at the command post. No, this is Vercors. It’ll be all over before long.’
After Oradour, no one had any doubts about the outcome of the fight going on to the south. The gaiety that had existed after the rescue of the Rolandpoint weapons, their own parachute drop, and the defeat of the Germans in the search for the Baronne’s paintings drained away again. Those events belonged to a different epoch, a period when they had almost begun to believe that the Germans were just fools who could be toyed with. What was happening to the south was the reality, and it was as though the whole village was holding its breath in an aching tension as the fighting continued.
Moch brought back little snippets of information which had come from Grenoble, and they all waited, praying the Germans would be repulsed. The Germans were equally on edge and went everywhere preceded by motor cyclists who continually dismounted and deployed to make reconnaissances. They were stony-faced, giving nothing away, and when Elsie, out with Jean-Frederic Dréo, barked at Klein-Wuttig’s car, the driver stopped and gave her a boot up the backside that sent her yelling to the farm. Two weeks later, an SS man appeared from Dijon and stuck up a large notice outside the mairie informing them that the Vercors resistance had been wiped out and reprisals were now taking place.
Urquhart showed no emotion. ‘If you want to play at generals,’ he said, ‘join the liberation army.’
Marie-Claude turned on him at once. Her expression was angry but there were tears in her eyes as well. ‘They tried,’ she snapped. ‘They just didn’t have your experience.’
Urquhart’s shoulders moved. ‘It’ll not be the experience of a couple of shot-down airmen that’ll do the job when the time comes,’ he said flatly. ‘It’ll be common sense and plain French guts. I shan’t be here, anyway.’
Marie-Claude’s eyes widened. ‘You’re leaving?’
‘We’re doing no good here.’
She caught her breath, shocked and bewildered, and it was a moment or two before she spoke. ‘You can’t go,’ she said.
Urquhart’s expression was blank. ‘I think I can.’
She stared at him, her scrutiny close and accusing. ‘What will become of us?’
‘The allies will come soon. All you have to do is lay low and keep quiet. Néry will be all right.’
‘I didn’t mean Néry.’ Her eyes showed the depth of her distress, and they gazed at each other in silence, her face entreating pity. ‘I meant me.’ She paused and gave a helpless gesture. ‘My mother. The farm. There’ll be no one here. Will Neville also be going?’
‘If I can persuade him.’
Marie-Claude’s eyes grew angry. ‘We’ve already lost the German,’ she said.
Urquhart’s eyes glowed with anger. ‘We’re supposed to be airmen,’ he said, ‘Not day-labourers.’
She made no further comment but, that night, Urquhart discovered that his papers had disappeared. For a while he stared at the wallet with its few French notes, then slipped down the winding stairs from the attic under the roof. Marie-Claude’s bedroom showed a light under the door and she was sitting up in bed with a shawl over her shoulders, staring at a Michelin map of the district. She glanced up as he entered but made no comment at his appearance in her room. She even seemed to be expecting him.
‘Where are my papers?’ Urquhart demanded.
‘I don’t know.’ Her eyes were still on the map. ‘If you’ve lost them, they’ll be hard to replace, with travel restricted by the invasion.’
Urquhart’s face was grim. ‘You’ve got them, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘You never intended us to leave! You wanted us here - to put fences up and mend the barn and feed the pigs. You just wanted a couple of free farmhands.’
‘Is there anything wrong with that?’ She lowered the map and stared at him defiantly, aware of her guilt but sickened at the thought that she would be on her own again, bearing all the responsibility, doing all the work.
She lifted the map again as if she regarded the matter closed, trying to assert her will by bluff, but Urquhart smashed it from her hands and grabbed for her. His fingers in her hair, he pulled her head round to face him, so that her neck was curved back, a vein at the side of it throbbing. Then he saw that there were tears in her eyes and abruptly he released her and pushed her away. For a moment she stared at him; then, standing stiffly upright by the bed, her head up, her hands at her sides, she quietly began to cry.
Urquhart frowned. ‘Does our being here mean so damned much to you?’ he asked.
She stared at him, her mind full of fearful uncertainties, and for the first time he noticed the faint lavender circles under her eyes that indicated how tired she was. ‘The farm’s all I have,’ she choked, dizzy and despairing as she saw it being snatched away. ‘It’s all I’ve ever had. I’ve fought to keep it ever since my husband died.’
Then her eyes became fierce again. ‘Go, if you want to!’ she said. ‘Those who are dead are dead! There’s no going back! I’ve accepted that! But no one’s ever going to beat me! This is my country and this is my land and it’s a part of me that never changes! There’s no land in the world like this!’
She was making no appeals to him, stating no case and asking no mercy, but, because he was of farming stock himself, he knew exactly what she meant. She reached into a drawer beside the bed and, taking out the documents he was seeking, she flung them at him. ‘There you are!’ she said. ‘You can go now, if you wish!’
Urquhart didn’t move and she looked up at him, her eyes still bright with tears. Then a huge sob racked her body and, as she turned her head away so that he shouldn’t see her misery, he pulled her to him and let her weep out her un-happiness against him. Her whole frame was shaking, the first sign of weakness he’d ever seen in her, the first crack in her armour.
‘Oh, Urk’t!’she wailed.
>
He held her for a while, letting her exhaust herself with her weeping. Then he swung her into his arms and lifted her on to the bed. She stared up at him, her eyes wide, her lips parted, a vague disquietude in her heart, wondering what he intended. But he simply pulled the sheet up to her chin and tucked it about her neck.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Not yet. We’ll stay a little longer.’
She was quiet the following morning, not looking at him, and for the first time she seemed uninterested when Father Pol arrived with Reinach and Ernouf with news of what the Germans had done on the Vercors massif. Men had been shot and tortured. One woman had been raped seventeen times with a doctor holding her pulse. Another, a Maquis officer, had been disembowelled and left to die with her intestines wound round her neck. It had stopped all demands for action in Néry.
Father Pol sighed, ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘the time’s coming when it’ll be worth dying despite the odds.’
‘There’s nothing to fear in death,’ Reinach muttered. ‘What we really fear’s the prelude, the process of dying. We should take the risk and face the Germans.’
‘Who?’ Marie-Claude asked quietly. ‘Sergeant Dréo with his wooden leg and Father Pol with his belly? There are no young men left.’
‘I think there are,’ Father Pol said quietly.
‘Who?’
Father Pol shifted himself in his chair for comfort. ‘One is an ex-soldier with a great knowledge of fighting. He has fought the Germans on three fronts and knows how they behave. The other is an expert at battle plans and military history.’ He stared at Neville. ‘You’ve lived long enough here to become part of this village,’ he went on. He glanced at Marie-Claude. ‘You’ve even entered into the lives of some of us. But we can’t ride into Heaven on a lot of historical quotations, my son. We have finally to take a chance on dying to destroy this monstrous cruelty called Nazism.’
Neville looked uncomfortable. ‘You can count on me,’ he said. ‘I’ll help.’
Father Pol was not satisfied. ‘Helping isn’t enough,’ he pointed out. ‘Tell us what to do! Tell us how to destroy the Germans! From the depths of history and for the love of Heaven, produce us a plan!’
3
The fighting in the north continued, but nothing had changed in Néry.
Depressed by the charge he’d been given, Neville wrapped a billhook in a piece of sacking. Tying it to the handlebars of Madame Lamy’s bicycle as if he were going hedging, he set off out of the village and up the slopes. His face wore a dogged look of determination because he knew Father Pol was in earnest and was waiting now with the others for something brilliant to emerge. He returned in the evening to sit at the kitchen table with a map of the district and a piece of paper on which he wrote down scratchy notes - deliberately illegible so that no one could guess at the blankness of his mind.
Because the Germans were still in control in Burgundy, the breaking of the iron ring round the Normandy bridgehead at the end of July and the beginning of August came as a total surprise. Fourteen days later, as they heard that the Americans had landed in the south, hope leapt up once more.
‘On the Feast of the Assumption,’ Father Pol crowed.
‘Obviously divine intervention,’ Reinach said dryly.
Neville said nothing. Conscious of the eyes of Father Pol on him, he was aware only of the dreadful dearth of ideas.
The following week, with the allies already well into Brittany and as far south as Nantes, news arrived that Pétain, the father-figure of Vichy France, had disappeared towards the German frontier with his jackal, Laval; and, as the Americans began to pound up the valley of the Rhone, it seemed that liberation was actually coming at last. Suddenly the Germans were retreating everywhere and German air activity, which had stopped with the invasion, started again, searching for the Maquis and stirring up the thoughts of revenge and the salvaging of honour all the more.
‘We are still waiting,’ Dréo hissed at Neville as he cycled past the forge.
Putting his head down, Neville drove doggedly at the pedals. When he returned to the farm, he refused to satisfy Marie-Claude’s curiosity about what he’d been doing -chiefly because he’d been doing nothing but stare helplessly at the curves and angles of the countryside from the ridge of land that ran round the village, his mind empty except for the despair of ever filling it with anything worth while. Producing a military plan was a very different thing from admiring one that had already been formulated.
The following day he tucked his trousers firmly into his socks once more and rode off yet again. Marie-Claude stared after him, bewildered.
‘What is he doing?’ she asked Urquhart.
Urquhart grinned. ‘He’s playing at Peter Pan. You’ve heard of Peter Pan?’
She sniffed. ‘I have been educated too. But to a Frenchman, Peter Pan is unthinkable.’
When Neville returned he was still not forthcoming and there was even a look of anguish on his face as he disappeared to his room with a map and nothing else but a piece of cheese. Marie-Claude’s warm heart, longing to give love and sympathy, went out to him and, seeing Urquhart smiling at her, she whirled on him.
‘Why don’t you go and help him?’ she snapped.
The tension in the village was obvious. To Tarnera it was just like a spring wound up too tight,
‘I think they’re measuring our throats for the nooses,’ he observed.
Klein-Wuttig took out a small pocket book and made a note in it. ‘I suppose you realize this is defeatist talk, Tarnera?’ he said.
‘What’s odd about defeatism when we’re being defeated?’ Tarnera asked. And he was right because, with a whole German army destroyed in the killing ground at Falaise, the allies were now into open country and driving on Paris where the Resistance was already out in the streets and the German garrison preparing to throw in its hand.
The village hotheads began to talk loudly of action once more and Communists from St Seigneur, their hair en brosse in best Resistance style, began to appear. They were neither countrymen nor even honest workmen but demagogic windbags who saw everything only in terms of their own politics.
‘Our party’s proved its right to rule France,’ they said. ‘We’re already sending miniature coffins to collaborators as a warning.’
‘I’ll wager a few are also being sent to old ladies with weak hearts by relatives hoping to inherit their money,’ Father Pol snorted. ‘If the music of the holy trumpets has to be paid for with twisted guts, then let us twist the guts about the right things!’
Despite his indignant disapproval, he was nevertheless driven to climbing on his bicycle and riding at full speed to the farm to demand when Neville was going to produce his plan.
‘All the world knows,’ he said, ‘that we not only invented democracy but also patented it and own the world copyright. But it won’t live long in the hands of people like those. It’s time we did something, if only to thwart the yahoos who wish to turn France into a political prison.’
‘They’ve blown up a roundhouse in Dijon,’ he shouted accusingly from the door as he left. ‘And smashed a crane -the only one in the area they had for lifting wrecked engines back on the tracks. What are we doing?’
‘For God’s sake,’ Neville said as the door slammed. ‘I’m not an expert! I’m only a student of history.’
Urquhart grinned. ‘You and your bloody history!’
Neville whirled, ‘And you and your bloody Dunkirk,’ he snarled. ‘You needn’t think that you won’t be part of the blasted plan when it comes off! It’s not the field marshals who fight the battles! It’s the brigadiers! Well, since you’ve fought the Germans hand to hand, teeth to teeth, eyeball to eyeball, when I finally come up with something, you can be the bloody brigadier!’
That night electrifying news arrived. The allies were on the outskirts of Paris and the whole of the capital was surging into the boulevards to meet them. By next morning the Americans were in front of Notre-Dame, and Free French armour was driving
down the Champs Elysees. The following day de Gaulle himself marched across the Place du Parvis Notre-Dame to attend a Te Deum in the cathedral. Paris had purged her soul and was breathing free air again after four years of humiliation.
As though at a signal, the German troops in Bourg-la-Chattel just to the north disappeared into thin air, and trucks with tricolours or red Communist banners were reported rushing through the streets containing bearded and ferocious-looking Frenchmen in uniform.
‘There are flags everywhere.’ Dr Mouillet had just returned from a visit to his lady friend. ‘Especially outside the homes of ex-Vichyites. And they’re shaving the heads of the girls who’ve been sleeping with Germans.’
‘They should shave their pussies, too,’ Lionel Dring said. ‘And tattoo a swastika on each of their tits.’
Marie-Claude whirled on him. ‘What do you know about it?’ she demanded. ‘How do you know what drove them to it?’
Dring looked surprised. He had long since ceased bothering to call on her, and he glanced angrily at Neville. ‘Well, since you have the taste for a foreign lover yourself, perhaps you would too -’
Marie-Claude silenced him with a round-arm slap across the face that startled them with the noise it made. ‘Get out,’ she spat.’ Get out!’
When he’d gone, Neville saw she was crying and put an arm round her.
‘I lost my husband in 1940,’ she sobbed. ‘I knew what happened between a man and a woman. I’m not just a virgin waiting for her lover. I had grown used to a man and sometimes I cried myself to sleep for want of one. And sometimes, when one of the Germans noticed me, God help me, I wondered what it would be like with him.’
As she pushed him away, her eyes full of tears, and vanished into the kitchen, Neville stared after her helplessly.