Five

 

The crash of the shots echoed all over the village. It had a special quality and those who heard it instinctively knew what had happened even before young Dring arrived, shocked and sobbing, with the news.

Slipping over the hedges with blankets, they found the bodies against the tree, their faces wet with rain. Elsie approached, nervously wagging her tail, then returned to the bodies and nudged at Jean-Frédéric with her nose, bewildered by his stillness. Lifting them over the wall, they buried them deep in the wood. Father Pol bent over the graves. ‘…Endormis dans la paix du Seigneur. Ouvrez pour eux les portes duParadis…’

‘Think we ought to let their mothers know?’ Dring asked.

‘Their mothers are in Mont Algérie,’ Reinach said.

‘They ought to have been in Mont Algérie too,’ Neville muttered.

‘But they weren’t, Officer Neville,’ Reinach said harshly. ‘Because war isn’t tidy, and because they were French and wished to take part.’

Sergeant Dréo was as stiff and erect as a statue when they told him. Behind him there was activity among the trees and small moving lights as an extraordinary number of men moved about in the undergrowth. Groups had arrived from the villages to the south. They’d heard there was to be a great victory and, wishing to be part of it, had arrived by the back lanes on foot, on bicycles, on horses and on petrolettes, and in cars resurrected from haystacks, caves and woods. There was a sound of digging and saws and muted swearing among the undergrowth that drowned the muffled sobbing of Dréo’s son, the dead boy’s father.

‘I shall kill that man,’ Sergeant Dréo said. ‘They were just boys with a little pride.’

Neville’s expression was sick and wretched and Dréo looked hard at him. ‘There’ll be no surrendering to me,’ he went on. ‘And I shall kill anyone who tries to stop me.’

Leaving the old man to comfort his son, they moved into the undergrowth where a headquarters had been set up. Dr Mouillet was bent over his bandages and dressings with a few frightened girls who’d heard of the shootings. One of them, Jean-Frédéric’s girlfriend, was sobbing bitterly. A telephone engineer from St Seigneur, who’d been a signaller in the army, was working over a radio set.

‘We’re in contact with Verdy de Clary,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to get de Frager now.’

Ernestine Bona pushed through the grass into the area of light round the lantern. ‘We’ve picked up a message from the Americans in the south,’ she said. ‘They’re heading for Dijon. The Spahis of the Free French First Division are with them. They were heading up the valley of the Saône but they’ve been told by Chaumont to get through to us instead. They say that if we can stop the Germans here for a while, they’ll have to retreat via Roches-les-Drapeaux, and the American tanks are heading down there. It’ll be like Falaise in Normandy all over again.’

‘How long do we have to hold them?’

‘Until the evening.’ The radio operator had a curiously dry voice that sounded like the rustle of old leaves.

‘That’s a whole day!’ Neville said. ‘We can’t hold them that long! We hadn’t planned to!’

‘Then for the love of God,’ Reinach said. ‘Let’s think about it.’ He turned to the radio operator. ‘Tell them we’ll do it.’

‘How?’

‘Let’s burst into the château tonight and shoot the bastards down,’ Lionel Dring said. ‘They’ll be no good without officers.’

‘Shut up!’ Reinach’s authority sat on his shoulders as if he’d been leading military formations all his life. ‘We can do better than that. What do you think I had in mind when I built that cellar?’

 

It was dark when the staff conference started, and the air seemed to be full of the distant thuds of explosions.

Klemens had been taken aback by the arrival of General Dannhüber who had had to leave Dijon in a hurry. When the Gestapo had started firing on police stations there had been an unexpected retaliation, and before they’d known what was happening the whole town was in the streets. The Germans had withdrawn hastily, and in the rush Dannhüber’s car and two others had been cut off. Petrol bombs had finished of one of them at Vangouillain and a burst of firing at Assômes the second. Knowing that Klemens was still in control to the north, with tanks under his command, Dannhüber’s car had headed as fast as possible for Violet and up to Néry.

Klemens had been none too pleased to see the general. When Frobinius had arrived and made his report, his plans for leaving the village without trouble had begun to collapse about his ears.

‘For God’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘All the SS do is to make the job harder for the army! For every Frenchman you frighten into submission, another dozen are driven into opposition!’

‘I must inform Reichsführer-SS Himmler of your view,’ Frobinius said.

Klein-Wuttig watched the clash of temperaments warily. There was something electric in the air and he was beginning to worry about his accusation of Tarnera. Frobinius had no such doubts.

‘Have no fear,’ he told him quietly. ‘He’ll be arrested as soon as he sets foot in Belfort. Probably Klemens as well.’

The conference opened in a cool atmosphere, with Klemens icy with fury at the sight of General Dannhüber sitting opposite him in the most comfortable chair in the room. Von Hoelcke, the panzer captain, sat next to the general, his uniform as smart as if he were about to go on parade for the Führer’s birthday. Rieckhoff and Doench, the majors from St Seigneur and Rolandpoint, both looked tired and rumpled and they were clearly uneasy. The Afrika Korps commander, Captain Witkus, wore an air of indifference because he was secure in the knowledge that if he didn’t think much of Klemens’ orders, he’d do as he’d learned to do in Africa and follow his own instincts. The naval man, Fregattenkapitän von Hassbach, still startled to find himself not a sailor but a cavalryman, was entirely bewildered.

Tarnera was the last to arrive. As he’d driven through the village he’d heard radios playing and seen chinks of light between shutters and curtains, and smoke rising into the damp still air. The bar had been closed, he’d noticed, and the only people he’d seen were German soldiers. He felt vaguely troubled and realised that he’d seen remarkably few people about the village all day.

Outside the door, Unteroffizier Schäffer had whispered to him about the arrival of General Dannhüber and acquainted him with Frobinius’ shooting of the three boys. Tarnera had said nothing but he was white-lipped with anger and the tension in the Baronne’s dining-room was clear.

Klemens outlined his plans sullenly. ‘I’ll take the centre rear of the column,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the general would like to take the centre van.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Dannhüber asked.

What Klemens meant was that he wished to be as close to his lorry-load of pictures as possible and well away from General Dannhüber who, he hoped, would be able to restrain Frobinius with his rank. He explained that the column would be led by tanks and lorries, followed by the Afrika Korps buses.

‘Experienced fighters, every man, General,’ he said. ‘Then I think perhaps your own car. There’ll be an 88 just ahead, then more lorries, and finally my own car followed by the marine cavalry and von Hoelcke’s last two tanks. How does that seem to you?’

Dannhüber considered. He was an intellectual general, thin-faced to the point of gauntness and deeply lined. The position Klemens had given him seemed sound as far as he could see. He was in one of the strongest parts of the column, near the tanks and 88s; and close enough to the experienced Afrika Korps men who at least wouldn’t make a shambles of anything they did, as the mounted sailors inevitably would. It seemed as safe as Klemens’ place, which he assumed would be as safe as anywhere. He glanced at his chief of staff, Colonel Kaspar, who sat alongside him, looking less like a soldier than the curator of a museum that he’d been until the war had snatched him up. He stared at the route Klemens had marked on his map.

‘Why this route?’ he asked.

‘Room to manoeuvre, sir,’ Klemens said. ‘The Fond St Amarin’s too narrow and the Chemin de Ste Reine has trees. The Rue des Roches is open all the way to the ridge and, since we have horse-mounted cavalry, we might even use them if we have to.’

‘God help us if we do have to,’ Dannhüber said, in which sentiment he was silently echoed by Fregattenkapitän von Hassbach. ‘What about the other roads?’

‘There’ll be strong patrols at the bottom of the Rue des Roches to make sure there’s no activity there. I’d rather keep my people out of the Chemin de Ste Reine altogether with those trees.’

Dannhüber nodded his approval and Klemens turned to von Hoelcke. ‘Any questions?’

‘Can my tanks get off the road?’

‘The road’s wide enough for two columns of traffic and you can move alongside it to any point of danger.’

‘I don’t want to be caught in any woods.’ The gunner major had fought his guns all the way up from the south and he wanted to keep them.

‘There are no woods in the Rue des Roches,’ Klemens pointed out, and the gunner nodded his assent,

‘That’s it then, gentlemen,’ Klemens said. ‘Perhaps we’ll take a drink before we go to our posts.’

As he rose, Goehr came forward with a tray of glasses of champagne. Since it might be their last chance to drink graciously for some time, Klemens had decided to put on a little show of ceremony. To Tarnera there was a strange air of unreality about the room. In the candlelight, with the rumbling of gunfire outside, they seemed like a lot of aristocrats in a revolution waiting for the tumbrils, and he wondered if this was what it had been like when Germany had been defeated at the end of the other war.