Three

 

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 Lemy’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 drily.

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 Rhône, 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 worthwhile. 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 realise 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 wind-bags 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 Elysées. 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.

Urquhart’s face was expressionless. ‘It’s no good, lad,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ll not get her any more than Dring will. He’s too impulsive; you’re not impulsive enough.’

Neville glared at him and for a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to blurt out what had happened between himself and Marie-Claude on the night when they’d saved the Rolandpoint weapons. But Urquhart was watching him with his usual cynical expression, and for a moment he even had the horrified feeling that he knew anyway.

The excitement went on into the next day. Young Dréo went over to Bourg on his Spitfire and brought back the in-formation that the partisans of both Right and Left were opening headquarters there. There had been a parade with tricolours and red flags and a band of bugles and drums, and the place had gone mad at the sight of disciplined Frenchmen.

He could hardly speak for excitement. ‘Communist execution squads are shooting Miliciens,’ he said, ‘and beating up shopkeepers, and the policemen who harried them in 1940. They’ve got the Vicomtesse de la Chattel and her boyfriend in the jail, as well as all the black marketeers and members of the Croix de Feu.’

That night, to everyone’s surprise, the Germans in Néry also disappeared. It was an incredible, unexpected thing, but it happened. Neville was the first to be aware of the growl of engines down the street, and together he and Urquhart and Marie-Claude pressed their faces to the gap in the shutters on the landing. Down the dusty drive to the farm and between the empty gateposts, they could see lights flashing beyond the trees and hear the grind of lorries.

The next morning, Reinach came hurtling into the kitchen. ‘They’ve gone!’ he yelled. ‘North-east towards Mary-les-Rivières and Germany!’

Immediately, tricolours appeared from windows; and a few unexpected bottles appeared from the cellars. People who’d been careful to keep out of the way during the hard days conveniently forgot that they’d always previously referred to the Maquis hiding in the forest as ‘terrorists’ and ‘woodlice’, and begged to be allowed to join them so they could say they weren’t collaborationists. Even old Balmaceda arrived in Mère Ledoux’s bar, very drunk, with his wig over one ear and clutching an ancient dusty flask.

‘Glasses, patronne,’ he yelled in a cracked boozy voice. ‘It’s absinthe! The real stuff! It only needs a drop of pump water to make it perfect!’

A few boys, already wearing berets, scarves and illicit armbands proclaiming them members of the Gaullist Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, were carrying carbines and had festooned their chests with belts of ammunition. Sergeant Dréo caught Neville in the stackyard and began to bellow indignantly at him. ‘They’ve gone!’ he yelled. ‘Without a scratch! All we have to show for our war is four years of humiliation!’

As they argued, Elsie began to bark, and the old man’s grandson came tearing down the hill on his Spitfire, his head down over the handlebars, his hair wild, his eyes bulging with horror.

‘They’re coming back!’ he was shrieking. ‘The Germans are coming back!’

As if by magic, flags, weapons, berets and armbands vanished back to their hiding places, and bottles were hurriedly stuffed out of sight. At the château, Patrice de Frager, who’d insisted on all the rooms the Germans had occupied being disinfected, hastily changed his mind. The discarded items of German equipment which had been tossed indignantly on to the lawn were quickly collected and returned to where they’d been found.

The first two Germans to appear were motorcyclists, wearing helmets and sweating in the heat. They were grey with dust and looked tired.

‘Back again!’ Reinach said with strained cheerfulness from the door of Mère Ledoux’s bar.

The soldiers eyed each other and one of them grinned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’re the vanguard of an SS division, and we’ve arrived complete with Gestapo hangmen and torture chamber.’

He was only joking, but nobody else asked questions. Within an hour, the whole lot of them were back, and this time the village could see the SS among them. By evening, they’d learned what had happened. The Germans had circled to the north and arrived in Bourg-la-Chattel to find the place celebrating. The Vicomtesse had been released along with her collaborator lover and the members of the Croix de Feu; and the town was now short of thirty of its senior citizens, shot by Milicien survivors, together with one or two drunks and defiant youths who’d dared to shout ‘Vive la France!’

 

It seemed that Néry wasn’t intended to take part in great events, and the best they could do was fall back on working out what humiliation they could wreak on the Germans when they got the chance.

‘How much bloody humiliation do they want?’ Neville asked bitterly, conscious that Reinach, Dréo and the others had taken to watching him carefully, as though expecting his ideas would suddenly light up in little balloons above his head as they did in comic papers.

Urquhart was pitiless. ‘Complete humiliation,’ he said. ‘As complete as theirs has been.’

The prospect of being responsible for the deaths of men – friends as well as enemies – was too much for Neville. Organising a battle and overseeing it at close quarters was very different from the impersonal business of dropping bombs from an aeroplane. ‘Wouldn’t it be sufficient if the Germans surrendered?’ he asked.

Urquhart shook his head. ‘They want an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and, anyway, the Germans would never surrender to the Maquis in case they were shot out of hand.’

Neville shifted uneasily in his clothes. He was an easygoing young man and his whole life had been one of avoiding decisions. Money had smoothed the way for him. You didn’t make decisions when you had enough money to pay other people to make them for you. Even his service in the RAF had been short because he’d been allowed to finish his university course before being pulled into uniform.

‘I don’t like it,’ he said uncomfortably.

Urquhart grinned. ‘I was always told,’ he said, ‘that it was from your class that leaders came. Born to leadership, they always told us in the Regulars. In the habit of giving orders. Ingrained ability for command. Didn’t they ever tell you that you were all budding Montgomerys? Or perhaps they’ve begun to realise at last that an army’s run by its sergeants and its colonels, and everybody in between doesn’t count.’

‘For Christ’s sake, stop needling me,’ Neville snapped. ‘I’m doing what I can.’

‘But not fast enough, old son.’ Urquhart was infuriatingly calm. ‘For a bloke who knows all about the war, you’re singularly slow in showing much appreciation of it.’

‘What the hell do they expect of me?’ The words burst out despairingly and Urquhart laughed.

‘The plan for a battle, old son,’ he said. ‘Drawn up like the wiring chart for a wireless set. A moves to the left in threes. B marks time while C advances at the double. Lots of little red arrows. That sort of thing.’

‘You don’t fight battles that way.’

Urquhart’s grin died abruptly. ‘I know bloody well you don’t,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve been in one or two. But you’ve either got to prove that you don’t or back out of it.’

‘I wouldn’t be able to look ’em in the eye if I did back out.’

‘Who? Marie-Claude?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come off it. You paw her like a farm boy.’

Neville glared. Urquhart had eyes in the back of his head. ‘I don’t think she even looks at me,’ he said.

‘Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’ Urquhart said mildly. ‘People are sometimes as bloody as they seem to be.’ His smile returned. ‘Still, love’s a bit like war, isn’t it? You might pull it off yet, if you can only produce a plan.’ He gestured. ‘The plan, the masterpiece that’s going to win the war, clear the Germans out of Néry, and leave her breathless with admiration.’

Neville writhed. ‘I’m not arranging a bloody massacre,’ he growled.

Urquhart shrugged. ‘You’re a fool if you think they’ll settle for less,’ he said.

 

As Neville tied the billhook to the handlebars of Madame Lamy’s cycle again next morning, Marie-Claude appeared, her eyes entreating, longing to be of assistance. ‘Perhaps I could help you.’ she said. ‘I know this land as I know my own flesh.’

Neville looked at her, his face expressionless. Then he nodded. ‘All right,’ he said.

This time, he took the Fond St Amarin, the third of the three roads leading from Néry to the east. As it left the village, it dipped for a while, then rose steeply between the trees where Guardian Moch’s house stood in a field at the top of a steep lane, surrounded by the crates and boxes and barrels which had once held his black market discoveries. He halted to examine one of the tunnels made through the undergrowth by wild boar, then pedalled away again to stop near the ridge and stare round him once more.

Marie-Claude caught up with him, panting. He was sitting in the saddle, his feet on the ground, looking back at the valley. Without speaking, he took out his cigarettes and lit one. Then he seemed to remember her and, offering the packet, went on staring fixedly at the road.

She watched him without speaking, not wishing to break his train of thought. He made no attempt to enlighten her, but rode higher up the slope to stop again just below the cutting where the road crossed the ridge. At this point the land to the left rose abruptly to a sheer chalk cliff called the Escarpment St Amarin, which was topped by undergrowth and trees. Beneath it, there was a narrow strip of land, then the river rattling in shallow pools over its stones in a four-foot gully that had been cut by the passage of the water. Alongside the river the road ran along a stony ridge higher than the land on either side. Beyond the road the fields fell away into a shallow hollow, made muddy by the seepage of the river under the road and full of lush green grass, then rose to a green meadow that lifted in folds as if it had been ridged by deep dykes – up and up to where the Crête St Amarin swept round in a semicircle above the escarpment. Just below the crest at the top of the meadow there was another ditch, covered by a deep belt of undergrowth, cutting off the ridge from wandering cattle as effectively as barbed wire.

‘The dam,’ Neville said unexpectedly. ‘The dam above the village I’ve heard about. Where is it?’

Marie-Claude pointed to the trees. ‘Up there. Dring’s supposed to look after it.’

‘What about the pump in the square? Does the water come from there?’

There was a new urgency in his manner. He seemed to have thrown off his gloom at last and was peering intently at the slopes.

‘Is it the plan?’ she said, drawn to him again by her warm heart and the wish to see him succeed. ‘You have thought of something?’

His eyes were still following the curves of the land. ‘Come on–’ he sounded impatient and her heart leapt at his enthusiasm ‘–the pump in the village. Does the water come from the dam?’

‘No, it’s fed by a spring on the other side of the hill. It’s a good spring. It never fails. The dam was built by the army in 1917 when they thought the front line might be pushed down as far as here.’

‘How much does it hold?’

‘Not enough to drown the Germans. It sprang a leak once but all it did was turn the ground in the dip there into deep mud. Some of it came on to the road.’

‘What if the spring dried up?’

She stared at him, puzzled. ‘It won’t. It never has.’

He shrugged. ‘It might this year. What about the Baronne? Could she tell a lie? Some people can’t.’

Marie-Claude gestured. ‘Her whole life’s been a lie. On his death-bed her husband told Father Pol she’d been the best wife in the world.’ She looked puzzled. ‘This is also to do with the plan?’

Neville ignored the question and, propping the bicycle against a tree, sat down and lit another cigarette. He suddenly seemed depressed and uncertain again, overwhelmed by the responsibility that had been handed to him. ‘I wonder if Urquhart isn’t right,’ he said after a while, ‘and you wouldn’t be a lot wiser just to let them go.’

‘No!’ She was indignant. ‘Surely you of all people understand! You’ve lived in France before the war.’

‘Nice. Promenade des Anglais. That’s not France.’

She paused. She knew what she wanted out of life as much as Reinach and Father Pol and the others. For months now she’d been working for it. Soon France would be free – with true Gallic arrogance, she couldn’t believe that the German occupation of a nation as cultured, noble and intelligent as the French could go on for ever – and, though she was far from being a peasant, she still had a peasant’s straight-thinking contempt for vacillation.

‘Would you live in France again, Neville?’ she asked.

Neville looked round, startled by the question. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Any time.’

‘Although you are English?’

‘France’s every man’s country,’ Neville said, and he could see she was pleased.

She paused and she seemed unexpectedly shy. ‘Would you do it for someone else?’ she asked. ‘Not because of France? Not for yourself alone?’ She lifted her head, her eyes shining. ‘For a girl, for instance?’

‘If she were the right girl.’

‘Permanently?’

‘No.’ Marie-Claude’s face fell and Neville went on easily. ‘My family’s wealthy, Marie-Claude. We don’t stay anywhere permanently. We go to the south of France for the season. To Salzburg for the festival. To Switzerland for the skiing.’

‘Would you take your wife with you on these trips? When you had a wife, of course.’

‘Certainly.’

She hesitated. ‘What if she were lacking in culture?’ she asked quietly. ‘Lacking in poise?’

Neville glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, then he leaned across and kissed her. ‘There’s no better teacher than money,’ he said.

 

Two evenings later, Marie-Claude invited Reinach to the farm for coffee. Neville’s idea had grown so suddenly he was almost afraid of it, and he had first tried it out on Urquhart. Urquhart had listened carefully, for once without a trace of cynicism in his expression, asking a lot of searching questions and even supplying a few answers to things that had worried Neville. And when Neville had finished, he’d sat back and looked at him with an odd, awed look on his face.

‘You’re all right, lad,’ he said.

Neville frowned, uncertain what he meant and suspecting sarcasm. ‘Thanks,’ he said sourly.

Urquhart was unperturbed. ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,’ he said. ‘I’m not in the habit of telling many people – especially officers – that they’re all right.’

Then Neville realised he’d meant what he’d said, and Urquhart grinned.

‘It’s a good plan,’ he said. ‘If we can only get these buggers to hold their water until the right moment, I think it’ll work.’

For the first time in months, Neville felt a real warmth for Urquhart. The distance between them had closed, and he now saw some meaning in what they’d been through together, some understanding of the comradeship Urquhart had felt in the regular army.

‘Thanks,’ he said again, and this time he was smiling too.

When Reinach arrived, Dréo and de Frager were already in the kitchen with Father Pol who was sucking down coffee with his vacuum cleaner noise. Neville was staring at a map, and Reinach was immediately aware that he seemed cheerful.

‘You have a plan?’ he asked.

‘It depends,’ Neville said warily, ‘on what you wish to inflict on them.’

Reinach looked quickly at Marie-Claude. ‘As much as possible, of course,’ he admitted.

Neville gestured. ‘Suppose they surrendered? Several hundred Germans throwing down their arms to a few Frenchmen ought to be enough humiliation even for you.’

Reinach’s gaze switched to Dréo who frowned. ‘We wish to destroy them as Napoleon destroyed the Austrians at Austerlitz,’ the old man said.

‘I’m not arranging a massacre.’

Dréo plucked at his moustaches. ‘Not even a small one?’ he asked.

‘At Bourg they shot the Miliciens when they were wounded,’ Neville said. ‘I’m not having any part of that. I’m aiming at surrender.’

‘We want dead.’ Reinach glanced again at Dréo, then at Father Pol, then back at Neville. ‘You aren’t losing your nerve, are you?’ he asked.

Neville said nothing because Reinach had put his finger on the very thing that was worrying him. He had begun to see that a general, whose responsibility was immeasurably greater than that of a factory manager because he was operating with human lives, had to take this hardest of all courses unflinchingly. He wasn’t sure he could. ‘I’m not a general,’ he said.

Reinach paused. ‘Very well. I’ll hold everyone in check.’

‘Can you?’

‘I can punch them in the jaw.’

‘What about the Rolandpoint men and the St Seigneur men.’

‘We shall need them?’

‘Yes.’

Reinach’s eyes narrowed as he accepted his responsibility as leader in a way that Neville knew he never could. ‘I’m not having our people set against the Rolandpoint and St Seigneur lot,’ he said bluntly. ‘Our enemies are the Germans. Tell us the plan. There are only three roads out of Néry. Which one do we use?’

Neville refused to be rushed. ‘However we do it,’ he said, ‘wherever we do it, we need men. How many have you got?’

Reinach looked round. ‘Me and Ernouf and Sergeant Dréo.’

‘Me,’ de Frager added.

‘And me.’ Father Pol put down his coffee cup. ‘I can pray to God for the gift of courage.’

‘That’s five.’ Urquhart spoke for the first time. ‘You’ve produced five.’

‘I’ll help,’ Marie-Claude said.

She’d half hoped he’d say No, she mustn’t, or that it would be too dangerous; but all he said was, ‘Six,’ and she frowned at his matter-of-factness.

‘Théyras,’ Dréo said. ‘Dring and Lionel Dring. Perhaps Gaston Dring too. He’s fifteen.’

‘Ten,’ Urquhart said. ‘Six of them getting on in years.’

‘Duclos. Guardian Moch. The Hénault boy and Jacques Jacquelot. Yves Rapin’s back too. Then there’s Gaudin and his sons, and Vic Letac and Dr Mouillet.’ Reinach sat for a while, thinking. Then he fished out a stub of pencil and began to write on the edge of a newspaper. ‘Thirty-seven,’ he said. ‘Including boys.’

‘Against what Klemens has got, it makes poor odds,’ Neville pointed out. ‘And to the two hundred Germans in Néry, you have to add five hundred from St Seigneur and two hundred from Rolandpoint. When they leave they’ll pass through here and move on as a unit. That makes it even poorer odds. What about the other places? Rolandpoint? St Seigneur?’

‘Rolandpoint have said they have thirty-nine,’ Urquhart said. ‘That makes seventy-six. It’s still not enough.’

‘How many do you want?’ Reinach demanded angrily.

Urquhart leaned forward. ‘The man who wins the battle is always the man who can bring most soldiers into action at the same time and at the same place,’ he said. ‘We need a lot, or it won’t be humiliation. It’ll be a disaster – for you!’

Reinach glanced at Father Pol. Then he shrugged. ‘We can contact Courbigny and Araigny and Tarey, I suppose. And I can telephone Drumont at Roches-les-Drapeaux and Armandeau at Dijoine.’

‘Go on,’ Neville said. ‘You’re doing better.’

‘Do you want the whole damned district?’

‘Why not?’

Reinach looked at Father Pol again and didn’t answer. Why not indeed? Every village that wanted one seemed to be getting a parachutage these days and there were thousands of Frenchmen just waiting for their opportunity to rise up and bash some German’s head in. ‘All right,’ he said.

‘We want men from Luchy and Lingean,’ Neville went on. ‘And St Verrier and St Bringt and Beauzois and Violet. Even the hill villages round Metz-la-Montagne. All of them.’

Reinach’s eyes were wide. ‘That’ll be hundreds.’

‘We need hundreds.’

Reinach frowned, suspicious. ‘This is a good plan, Neville?’ he asked.

‘Urquhart thinks it’ll work.’

‘And that’s important?’

‘He’s got to put it into effect. He knows where to site the weapons and what the Germans will do.’

Reinach shrugged. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the Bourg-la-Chattel, Diepape and Pailly men. They have a few scores to pay off. And probably a few more.’ He leaned forward. ‘When do we put this plan into effect, Neville? Soon?’

‘When the Americans are closer. So that the Germans don’t have time to turn round and lash out.’

‘What do you think they are? Of course they’ll lash out. You’ve heard of Vercors. You’ve heard of Oradour.’

De Frager shifted uneasily. ‘And I hope you haven’t failed to notice that an SS major’s joined the staff at the château. What about the old people and the children?’

‘I’ve not forgotten the SS major,’ Neville seemed almost smug. ‘Or the old people and children. And I’ve heard of Vercors and Oradour. This time, though, the Germans will be helping us.’

‘I can imagine it!’ Reinach snorted.

‘They will,’ Neville insisted. ‘We’ll get them to.’

Reinach’s eyes flashed. ‘Then, for the love of God, tell us where and when! Are we going to fight like your famous Milord Wellington at Waterloo?’

‘No.’ Neville looked young and excited. ‘The battle’s Sedan, 1870.’

There was a sudden chill in the room and an immediate freezing of expressions. Sedan! There might have been glory in defeat at Salamanca and Waterloo but there was none at Sedan. The war of 1870 against the Prussians had been only blunder, stupidity and corruption, and the hated name of its climactic defeat made them look at each other quickly.

‘Sedan!’ Reinach said.

‘Sedan!’ Dréo echoed.

Neville’s enthusiasm washed over their indignation. ‘The Prussians got your army into a valley,’ he said, ‘and surrounded them with guns. Moltke said he’d got them in a mousetrap.’

Sergeant Dréo stared at him, wooden-faced. ‘The French fought well,’ he rumbled. ‘I had a great-uncle there.’

‘They were beaten before they started,’ Neville said. ‘Ducrot knew it. “We’re in a chamberpot,” he said. “And we’ll be in the shit right up to our necks.”’ He leaned forward, his eyes alight. ‘We can get the Nazis into a chamberpot.’

Dréo scowled. ‘Does it have to be a German plan?’ he growled.

There was a sudden deadlock and it looked as if they’d reject what Neville had to offer. Tears came to Marie-Claude’s eyes, then her face lit up and she rushed to his help.

‘What irony if the Germans were defeated by a German plan!’ she said.

Her enthusiasm turned the trick and there was an immediate lightening of glowering expressions.

‘I can just imagine their faces,’ Sergeant Dréo crowed. ‘Tell us what we must do, Neville, and let us get on with it before it’s too late.’