Seven

 

There was only one thing in everyone’s mind: the invasion waiting just across the Channel, holding back only for the days of fair weather when it could be launched against the shores of France.

There was no fear anywhere that it wouldn’t succeed. With the Germans already out of Africa and in trouble in Russia and Italy, and with the vast industrial might of America behind it, failure just couldn’t be conceived.

‘After all,’ Marie-Claude pointed out, ‘there are a quarter of a million men waiting in England, and the British Empire, the United States and Russia are a formidable combination to take on, even for Hitler’s Germany.’

They could hear the RAF going over at night, and learned that Auxerre and Tonnerre and Châtillon-sur-Seine had been bombed because they were junctions leading to the invasion coast. They also heard of the Resistance blowing things up in Besançon and the Doubs next door, where the Resistance was stronger because the high ground was higher and they were harder to get at. Occasionally they even heard of sabotage in Dijon, which was an important German military administration centre for north-eastern France, and of damage done to railway points and turntables. The townspeople seemed better at that sort of thing than the country-dwellers.

Their lack of success was something that bore heavily on the men of Néry. Twice they had failed and suddenly the good hard life of the fields and the pleasure of cheating the Germans with high prices for their food was no longer enough. They were beginning to itch for action again. Every man in France was beginning to itch for action, and the men of Néry had old scores to settle.

As the Germans well knew.

 

‘According to our predecessors,’ Colonel Klemens was saying, ‘Resistance cells sprang up here in 1942 and 1943 but were totally destroyed. Since then there’s been nothing.’ Tarnera and Klein-Wuttig waited. There was obviously something on the colonel’s mind.

‘However,’ he went on, ‘Dijon’s had a report that a parachute drop took place here recently and I want supervision of the villages in the command to find out where it went to. Dijon suspects Rolandpoint and I want a man there to keep an eye on the place.’

‘I’ll go,’ Klein-Wuttig said at once.

‘Disguised as what?’

‘I’ll find something.’

‘See that you do. Go and see Major Doench at Rolandpoint. Anything suspicious to be reported at once. We’ll follow it up with a house-to-house search.’

 

The failure to contact the Resistance in Rolandpoint had drawn Urquhart and Neville closer together, Neville edgy and frustrated, Urquhart more philosophical and with an old soldier’s calm.

‘When do we go then?’ he demanded of Marie-Claude.

She seemed unexpectedly cheerful. ‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘Without Arsène, you have to stay here for a while longer.’

Then her smile faded and he had the feeling that some secret tribunal within her was summing them up. He shrugged. Since she was obviously used to running things, they had to leave it all to her.

‘How long will it take to organise the route again?’ Neville asked.

‘A month.’ Her cheerfulness had given place now to briskness. ‘Two months. Perhaps longer. Sometimes airmen have stayed hidden in attics for as long as three.’

As she disappeared, Urquhart stared after her, his expression puzzled. ‘That girl’s a bloody sight cleverer than I thought,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

Urquhart grinned. ‘I have the sad dry taste of shattered illusions,’ he said. ‘I thought she was keeping us here for the glory of France. Instead, now, I think she’s keeping us here because we’re a bit of extra bloody labour about the farm.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

Urquhart looked at Neville’s eager youthful face. ‘People have a habit of belying their looks, old son,’ he warned.

‘Well, what if they do. I suppose we owe her a bit.’

‘Okay.’ Urquhart laughed. ‘Then next time there’s some muck-spreading to be done, let’s see you at it, boy, with a bit of this same enthusiastic willingness to repay, instead of creeping up to it like an undertaker approaching a corpse.’

Quite clearly, Marie-Claude had them exactly where she wanted them and there was nothing they could do but accept it, able to do no more than fight the war at a distance through the BBC.

That night, Dréo, Reinach and Ernouf turned up at the farm to listen to the broadcast from London, all claiming that their own batteries had given up the ghost. Smiling his sideways withdrawn smile, Urquhart decided that they’d really come only to daydream about the mayhem they hoped to commit on the Germans when the second front became a fact.

‘And since they haven’t anything more lethal than those guillotine things they chop the bread with,’ he thought, ‘it’s a pretty pointless bloody exercise.’

The radio behaved as if half its inside was missing, so that Madame Lamy was continually on her feet, pounding the case. Her efforts made little difference and reception remained poor.

Above the crackling, however, it was still possible to feel some of the excitement in the air. The announcer gave no dates but he seemed to be suggesting that the invasion was just round the corner. ‘When the allies come,’ he said, ‘they will rely on your help. In no more valuable way can this be given than with information about the enemy. Observe him more closely…’

‘How close do they want?’ Marie-Claude snorted. ‘He’s already standing with one foot on our necks.’

She was shushed to silence and they listened wistfully to the long list of personal messages ‘Marie sends her best regards to Ratouf’, ‘Napoléon passa par le tombeau comme il a passé partout’, ‘C’était Anne de Bretagne avec ses sabots’ – messages that were meaningless to the Germans, but contained hidden instructions for those they concerned. Occasionally a personal message to a family to say their son was safe in England was slipped in, occasionally something insulting for the Germans, but none was ever prefaced with ‘D’Auguste à César’ and they were all aware that somehow the war was passing over their heads.

There was a long silence as the announcements finished, and a distinct sense of anticlimax. Marie-Claude looked angrily at the hopeless expressions on the faces around her.

‘We weren’t expecting any messages,’ she pointed out sharply.

‘One might just have come,’ Ernouf said wistfully.

‘To tell us what?’

‘Well–’ Ernouf shrugged ‘–we can’t just sit here doing nothing. In Paris, Maquisards disguised as Milice got into the Ministry of Information and killed a few traitors.’

‘And in Marseille,’ Marie-Claude said, ‘when they blew up a brothel the Germans used, the Gestapo destroyed the old port and sent thousands to concentration camps.’

Ernouf shifted uncomfortably. ‘The Francs-Tireurs Partisans are active,’ he said.

Reinach snorted. ‘The FTP are Communists and don’t fight for France. Whenever they murder a German officer the Gestapo take twenty innocent hostages. I spit on the FTP. All they do is raid banks for money, mairies for ration cards, and tabacs for cigarettes. There are more Frenchmen killed getting cigarettes than anything else.’

There was another long silence. One view seemed to be that active resistance would erode German morale, another that it was best to lie low until the invasion.

‘We should kill Germans,’ Ernouf said doggedly. ‘That’s the understanding.’

‘Where?’

‘Does it matter where?’

‘It matters a lot,’ Urquhart said. ‘Where you do it dictates the sort of weapons you’ll need.’

The older men looked blank. ‘Has war changed so much?’ Sergeant Dréo asked. ‘At Verdun it was just rifles and machine guns.’

‘There are a few refinements these days.’

Ernouf gestured. ‘Then we must just kill them with what we’ve got,’ he said. ‘Wherever we can.’

‘The guerrilla’s job’s not to hold ground,’ Neville pointed out earnestly. ‘It’s to hinder the enemy’s progress across it.’

They stared at him indignantly. ‘Doubtless you’ll know exactly what to do then,’ Ernouf muttered.

‘Yes, I will.’

‘Well, what?’

‘You don’t have to look further than Wellington.’

They looked at each other, puzzled.

‘Who is this Wellington?’ Dréo growled.

Dring’s shoulders lifted. ‘He’s nobody from here.’

‘He defeated Napoleon at Waterloo,’ Neville explained.

‘Oh, him!’ Dréo shifted uncomfortably. ‘Napoleon wasn’t himself that day.’

Neville grinned. ‘No. He had piles.’

Reinach interrupted. ‘Never mind Napoleon’s piles,’ he growled. ‘What did this Wellington do at Waterloo that was so clever?’

‘Nothing more than he’d done before with Napoleon’s marshals.’ Neville was vital with eagerness. He was no good about the farm and ham-fisted when it came to making repairs, but on his own subject there was nobody to touch him – certainly not in Néry – and he plunged into his theme with enthusiasm.

‘He waited until Napoleon had exhausted himself trying to break into his lines. He did it at Torres Verdas. He did it at Busaco and half a dozen other places. He let his enemies fight for him.’

‘So?’ Dréo’s expression was suspicious, even dangerous.

Neville’s face was bright and innocent with youth and knowledge. ‘So when you start something, make sure that the Germans can’t hurt you, and then go for them as they retreat.’

Dréo swallowed the contents of his glass at a gulp. ‘And when do you predict the Germans will start this retreat?’ he demanded.

Neville smiled. ‘After the invasion,’ he said.

The argument went on late into the night and was resumed early the following morning outside the gate, as Reinach stopped his lorry to pick up scrap for Sergeant Dréo. Dréo and his son were with him, sitting in the back of the vehicle, their artificial legs stuck stiffly out in front of them.

Reinach had obviously been brooding all night, and he started off again at once as he shoved and heaved at an old harrow.

‘We’ve got a few weapons,’ he said in a low voice.

‘I’ve seen them,’ Urquhart said. ‘You’ll not get far with those.’

‘I have two shotguns and a rifle,’ Marie-Claude put in. ‘I hid them in the woods. They’re still there.’

‘Rifles and shotguns,’ Neville observed, ‘aren’t much good against Spandaus and Schmeissers and tanks.’

For once the two Englishmen found themselves thinking the same way, if for different reasons. To Neville it was simply an exercise in historical logic: A plus B equals C. To Urquhart it was nothing but the voice of experience. He’d been through it. Their unanimity obviously irritated Reinach.

‘You two talk too much,’ he snarled.

Urquhart indicated Neville. ‘He knows what he’s talking about,’ he said. ‘He’s read the books and, what’s more, they’ve stayed read.’

Neville grinned at him. ‘And he,’ he said, ‘knows because he spent two years fighting the Germans. Hand to hand. Tooth and nail. Ask him.’

‘Is this true?’ Dréo asked.

‘Yes,’ Urquhart growled.

Three pairs of eyes switched to Neville and he gestured. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said, ‘before you start doing anything, why not get in touch with London and see what they can do to help?’

The struggle with the harrow stopped for a moment as they stared at each other. They all knew what London meant. Though Russia and America had come into the war, because London had been the first to defy Hitler in 1940 it was still London that mattered.

‘There’s the radio at Rolandpoint,’ Reinach said thoughtfully.

The argument ground on, the harrow forgotten. Then Father Pol rattled into the yard on his bicycle. He wore his shovel hat over his eyes and had tucked his dusty soutane up out of the way of the pedals. Now that the weather had grown warm, his sockless feet were thrust into wooden sabots. He was in a hurry, pedalling as fast as his fat legs would go. As he reached the low wall that surrounded the kitchen entrance he flung the bicycle down, fell over it in his haste, and stumbled towards the group by the lorry. He stank of rank sweat.

‘We’re proposing a festival for Ste Amalie-de-Lachume,’ he said loudly.

‘Who’s Ste Amalie-de-Lachume?’ Reinach demanded. ‘I’ve never heard of her.’

‘My son, the Church has plenty of all-purpose saints no one has ever heard of that she can call on when they’re needed. Even St Blaise for tonsillitis.’ Father Pol was using his stomach to propel them towards the house. ‘I need a committee. I’m proposing to ask the German commandant for special dispensation to allow us a little celebration with candles in front of the Henri IV window.’

As they crowded into the kitchen, he shut the door and leaned on it to recover. ‘It’s the absence of fats,’ he said. ‘It leaves one exhausted.’ He drew a deep breath and went on in a rush. ‘Trouble,’ he said. ‘Father Xavier sent one of his choirboys from Rolandpoint on a racing bike.’

The door jerked behind him and the two Dréos, who had somehow struggled down from the lorry despite their artificial legs, pushed him aside. When they were all inside, he started again. ‘The Germans got a tip-off,’ he said, ‘and picked up a man near Rolandpoint with the cords from a parachute. He’d used them to tie up staves on his farm. They tortured him and found out where Arsène was. He’s now in La Butte Prison at Besançon but he managed to get a message to his radio operator who bolted to St Seigneur. He’s sitting there now with the radio and no one to give him instructions. The Rolandpoint réseau’s scared stiff.’

Elsie began to bark, and Neville dragged out the milk yield book they had to keep for the Germans and started filling it in blindly. Urquhart grabbed a scythe that had stood by the kitchen door and began to remove the blade. Marie-Claude banged down a history of Néry she’d started to write as a young girl, long since abandoned and recently rediscovered as an excuse for when people visited the farm.

They were all talking loudly of Ste Amalie-de-Lachume when Madame Lamy turned from the window. ‘It’s the Baron,’ she said. ‘And Guardian Moch.’

De Frager was dressed dramatically in black, and Neville leaned over to Urquhart to whisper. ‘He thinks he’s Rupert of Hentzau.’

De Frager removed his hat with the sweeping gesture of a Cyrano and faced them with eyes that flashed so much he seemed to have been practising.

‘We need every man we have,’ he announced loudly. ‘The Germans are going to lay on a raid at Rolandpoint.’

They all sat up at once and the sly smiles at de Frager’s histrionics vanished.

‘How do you know?’ Reinach asked.

‘Ernestine Bona,’ Moch pointed out. ‘She says that she helped Marie-Claude a little while back and it’s up to us now to help them in return. They’ve got to get rid of their weapons.’ He placed a piece of paper on the table. ‘That’s what they’ve got. I picked it up from Brisson who has the garage.’

Reinach was reading the list out loud. ‘Two bazooka anti-tank guns; six Brens, with spares and extra magazines; thirty-six rifles; twenty-seven Stens, each with three hundred rounds; five pistols, each with fifty rounds; forty Mills grenades; twelve other grenades; a hundred and twenty kilos of plastic explosive; twelve thousand rounds of .303 ammunition; six thousand rounds of German Parabellum ammunition–’ he looked up. ‘Mon Dieu, you can’t hide that amount! There must be over a thousand kilos!’

De Frager gestured again. Like everything else he did, it seemed as if it belonged on a stage and had been rehearsed in front of a mirror. ‘Do you propose to let the Germans find them?’ he snapped.

‘Surely they’ve got a look-out watching the place?’

‘There’s a man in black leather on a motorcycle,’ Moch said. ‘Brisson thinks he’s an officer from Néry. He doesn’t know where the weapons are but he’s making sure nothing moves.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Sergeant Dréo said, ‘if we’re caught trying to get that pile away they’ll shoot the lot of us!’

Marie-Claude drew herself up, her eyes flashing. ‘You’ve been saying for months that we must do something,’ she said furiously. ‘Well, here it is, that something! You’ve been on your knees for four years! Stand up for once! I’ll supply the horse and the platform.’

De Frager gestured. ‘I have a car,” he said wildly. ‘Full of German petrol. Let’s drive in at full speed and grab the stuff.’

They didn’t even bother to answer him.

‘Where’s it hidden?’ Urquhart demanded.

Moch’s sly eyes flickered. ‘In Brisson’s loft.’

‘What’s behind the loft?’

‘The yard.’

‘And behind that?’

‘Brisson’s brother’s place,’ Dréo said. ‘He used it for scrap. He worked with Brisson until they quarrelled. He’s dead now.’

Urquhart leaned forward. ‘Where does the yard lead to?’

‘The other end of it’s in the Chemin des Chats. They say it got its name because it’s where all the cats do their courting and it always smells of cat-pee.’

Urquhart was silent for a moment and they all waited. There was something about Urquhart. His eyes were often sombre, even when he smiled, as though his life was an ocean of experience, and without conscious effort he could always dominate the room when he wanted attention. Not because he was handsome – he was far less handsome than Neville or de Frager – or because he had the gift of words. But in a smiling, sardonic way that managed to project personality, confidence and knowledge.

When he spoke again, it was clear his mind was busy with an idea.

‘Can you get through to the Chemin des Chats from Brisson’s place?’ he asked.

‘Not likely,’ Moch said. ‘There’s a high wall. His brother built it when they quarrelled.’

‘How high? Too high to get over with a pair of steps?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘Can it be seen from the main street?’

‘No.’

‘Where does the Chemin des Chats lead to?’

‘Out of the village in the direction of Néry. The other way it goes down to the Grande Place. But it winds.’ Moch’s narrow face was bright and eager now and he seemed to have caught at the idea forming in Urquhart’s mind. ‘The Germans wouldn’t see a thing – not even if they were standing in the Grande Place. We could get our men down there and carry it away in small lots.’

Neville gestured. ‘For God’s sake, if the village filled up with men from Néry, your German on his motorbike would see them immediately, wouldn’t he? Where is he?’

‘On the terrasse of Hytier’s place – the Bar de la Frontière. Down the street from the Bona farm. He can see the whole street from there – even the garage.’

‘Not the back of the garage,’ Reinach pointed out. ‘Not the lane.’

‘Are there houses in the lane?’ Urquhart asked. ‘Enough for people to be moving up and down?’

‘Plenty.’

Marie-Claude was leaning eagerly over Urquhart now. ‘Go on, Urk’t,’ she said. ‘You’re making sense.’

Father Pol was not so impressed. ‘How do we move the weapons up the lane?’ he asked. ‘And where to?’

Dréo’s son slapped his thigh. ‘The drain!’ he said. ‘Just above the village. It was put there when the place flooded in 1937.’ He pulled a face. ‘It’s also a sewer of course – for the timber mill and the cottages on the hill. But we could hide them in there.’

‘Better still,’ Reinach said, ‘why not put them in at the top and take them out again at the bottom? It runs under the road and comes out in the wood, in a ditch that leads to the river. We could have a cart waiting down there.’

‘How do you get them through?’

‘Men in the tunnel,’ Dréo’s son said. ‘I went through it myself once before I lost my leg – when my dog went in after a hare.’

‘It’s knee deep in mud and shit!’

‘For the love of God,’ Marie-Claude said. ‘If you like, I’ll go in.’

Reinach grinned. ‘The old men use the bridge to sit on and talk. They could pass the stuff down as it arrives. But how do we get it up to them?’

‘Over the wall and through the back of Brisson’s brother’s place.’ Moch said. ‘Then out into the lane. There’s a window at the back of Brisson’s loft. Brisson could handle every-thing. He’s already wetting his pants with fear.’

‘There are a thousand kilos of the stuff,’ Neville pointed out soberly.

‘And even with the Lord’s help,’ Father Pol said, ‘that’ll take some carrying. The Germans will soon notice if every man in the village disappears.’

‘Then use women,’ Urquhart said. ‘Send them up to talk to the old men. Tell the old ones to fetch their husbands home to dig the garden. Tell them to go up to look for firewood. Old women carry bags. Young women push prams.’

‘The stuff’s heavy,’ Moch warned.

‘A Bren takes to pieces. And a woman can carry a stripped Sten in her shopping bag.’

Marie-Claude’s eyes were shining. ‘Ernestine Bona could organise them,’ she said. ‘She’s not short of guts.’

‘What about the rifles? And the rocket-launchers? You can’t get those in a shopping bag.’

‘Hand-carts,’ Reinach said. ‘Load them with sacks, wood, vegetables. Shove the weapons underneath.’ He slapped his thigh and for the first time there was an eager light in his eyes. ‘We can be there by midday and clear the place before curfew.’

‘What about the big stuff?’ Dréo’s son asked. ‘Brisson can’t even take a car to pieces, let alone a machine-gun.’

‘I can,’ Urquhart said. ‘I’ll go over there.’

‘I’ll go, too,’ Father Pol said. ‘I’m too fat to climb into drains but I can go and help Father Xavier.’

‘We ought to get a message to them,’ Moch said. ‘Before they do something stupid. My daughter’s in the village with the petrolette. She can take it.’

While Father Pol began to write, Moch dragged his daughter out of Mère Ledoux’s bar where she was drinking an ersatz coffee with Gaston Dring. She was fifteen, and brown as a young partridge, and Marie-Claude stuffed the message into her brassière between her plump young breasts.

‘Ride fast,’ she said. ‘So that your skirt blows up. If they see your legs, they’ll not think of looking anywhere else.’

As the little red petrolette roared off, Urquhart reached for Marie-Claude’s ancient cycle. ‘When are the Germans expected?’ he asked.

‘They make their searches at midnight,’ Moch said. ‘When they expect to catch everybody in bed.’

Urquhart grinned and drove at the pedals. ‘Better make sure they are in bed then,’ he said.