By morning about thirty containers remained on the DZ. Jean Claude, who had napped from time to time during the night, could tell it was going to be a scorching day as soon as the sun came up. With the dawn came renewed gunfire, concentrated now in the north, southeast, and southwest.
Reports arrived of German assaults on several approaches to the DZ. The heaviest was at Châteauneuf. Another was at the site of the roadblock where Jean Claude had fought the day before. Again came requests for ammunition and reinforcements. Men rushed off to deliver armaments and join the defenders.
Jean Claude joined a group of about two dozen men heading back to the roadblock. They found a little truck and crammed it full of firearms, ammunition, and crate after crate of grenades.
Arriving at the back of the hill as they had the day before, they heard gunfire once again on the other side, though it had a different sound. The Germans had returned in force, and this time they had brought heavy machine guns. Jean Claude thought one of the rocky promontories he had noted the previous day might provide good cover, and he suggested that the men head there. The climb was made arduous by the crates of arms they carried, and by the growing heat.
The sight that greeted them from their vantage on the ridgeline was close to desperate—the maquisards down at the road were outnumbered and outgunned. The roadblock itself had changed hands; the Germans had overrun it and were now using it for cover. German soldiers, attempting to outflank the maquis position, were climbing up the slope below.
It was instantly clear to Jean Claude that they had to hold the high ground. He shouted to the men with Bren guns to take up positions around the rocky abutment. They complied.
At that moment, Jean Claude recalled afterward, he was struck by a thought that gave him a distinct twinge of fright: The other men were regarding him as their commander. He was, after all, the uniformed American who had parachuted in to help. They probably supposed he had more combat experience than they did, though the truth was almost certainly the reverse.
There was no time for hesitation. Trying to project a confidence he didn’t feel, Jean Claude positioned men a little way down the slope, on the maquis side of the roadblock, to give some depth to the guerrillas’ defenses and provide covering fire if they needed to retreat. He told them not to bunch up. He assigned two men to be runners, and two more to distribute ammunition and grenades. He sent several men to the rear, to guard against flanking actions from that direction.
From the promontory Jean Claude watched his second line form up behind rocks and trees and begin to add their supporting fire to the general din. He could see that the German soldiers climbing the hillside were stretched out and exposed. He gathered a small group and led them partway down, toward the rear of the German flank. At close range, they opened fire with automatic weapons and hurled grenades. The enemy troops began to fall back. In occasional lulls in the gunfire, Jean Claude heard them shouting. He realized that not all the men in German uniforms were German; they spoke in several languages, one of which he didn’t recognize. The maquisards from the DZ forced most of the soldiers back down to the road, where they took cover behind the roadblock. Jean Claude immediately led his men back to the ridgeline.
Summoning his runners, he told them to spread the word: Concentrate fire on the German speakers, as they were undoubtedly the officers and noncoms.
Possibly because he was contemplating language, Jean Claude then had a thought that momentarily sickened him: He still had his codes and crystals in his pockets, as well as the schedules indicating the dates, times, and frequencies for his communications with Baker Street. He had a brief, nightmarish vision of what could happen if he was killed and the enemy searched his pockets. Others would be likely to die because of his indiscretion.
He didn’t have time to dwell on it. The men were all suffering from thirst. The day was growing hotter by the hour, and the guerrillas, unaccustomed to pitched battles, had not thought to bring water. Jean Claude instructed a runner to drive the truck back to the DZ and return with water, more ammunition, and a status report on the clearance of the containers.
There came a lull in the fighting as the Germans regrouped in response to the initial, sharp attack on their flank. Jean Claude took advantage of it to pick his way down to the road and confer with the maquisards there. He set out with three men, scampering down the hill, hiding behind rocks and trees, slipping past isolated enemy positions and patrols. They were near the bottom when Jean Claude heard what sounded like a pistol shot. One of his men, wounded in the torso, collapsed. Jean Claude hit the ground and crawled forward. Seconds later he came across the body of a German soldier with what looked like knife wounds. One of his other men, he presumed, had found the shooter and stabbed him to death.
Jean Claude crept onward. He reached the roadside and found the guerrillas gathered there. He discovered that there were some five hundred of them, and was pleased to learn that very few had been wounded. Talking with their leaders, he suggested that they concentrate on holding the road and covering its far side; he would move some of his men partway down the hill and try to prevent the enemy from advancing by that route. He told them he would send down ammunition once the truck returned from the DZ.
Then he and his two companions set out back up the hill. Jean Claude never found out what happened to the wounded man.
It was late morning, and scorching hot, by the time they reached the ridgeline. Jean Claude repositioned his men in two defensive lines, one atop the hill and the other a little way down. There they waited, with Bren guns and crates of grenades.
The Germans repositioned their forces too during this period of relative calm. They brought in truckloads of fresh troops, and shifted heavy machine guns to emplacements with good cover and clear sight lines to the ridge.
When the German assault came, it was furious. It began with a sustained barrage from the machine guns aimed at the ridge. Then German soldiers began climbing. It was difficult going, as the slope was steep and gravelly, but there were a lot of them. Automatic fire raked the ground in front of the advancing men.
The maquisards returned fire with Bren guns and, when the soldiers got close enough, with Stens. Many of the enemy soldiers were wounded or killed, and bodies began to accumulate on the slope. But the sheer cyclic rate of fire of the German machine guns was overwhelming, and the maquisard gunners were frequently silenced for short periods, unable to do anything but take cover, while the German troops muscled up the hillside. The guerrillas positioned partway down the hill were forced to retreat to the second line up on the ridge.
But there they held. They had good cover—and the huge quantity of grenades they had brought from the DZ. These were effective only as far as they could be thrown, of course, but the maquisards, hurling them with abandon, were able to create a lethal hail of metal that the soldiers could not cross. The Germans halted their advance, and for a time the guns fell silent.
Jean Claude used the lull to distribute ammunition and grenades. Water was as much in demand as ammunition, but still there was none. Jean Claude and the others could see German troops moving about down by the roadblock, but couldn’t make out what they were doing.
Then the German assault resumed. It began with the din of machine guns, once again raking the ground in front of advancing infantrymen. Then came an even more hellish sound. The Germans had brought up mortars.
Jean Claude and his men retreated a short way to take cover in a stand of trees behind the ridgeline. The Germans saw them move, and timed mortar rounds to explode in the treetops, producing an infernal storm of metal and splintered wood. Jean Claude moved from tree to tree, trying to find clear lines of sight to return fire, but as the barrage went on he sometimes found himself crouching, pressed tightly against a tree trunk, practically hugging it, in the hope that the big lower branches might protect him from the howling blizzard of shrapnel and splinters. Men around him screamed and died. Jean Claude was thoroughly terrified.
Machine-gun fire continued marching up the hill toward the ridgeline, and German soldiers followed it. Jean Claude could see that the position was about to be overrun. He led his men at a sprint back to the rocky outcrop, where they had left their precious cache of grenades. They popped up to throw grenades and fire at the advancing soldiers as best they could, changing positions frequently. The lead German soldiers were nearly at the ridge.
The enemy fire grew so intense that Jean Claude and his men could no longer leave cover to shoot back. They began blindly rolling grenades, as fast as they could, over the edge. They took whole crates of grenades, pulled a few of the pins, and slid the crates down the gravelly slope, greatly expanding the grenades’ kill zone.
It was a desperate tactic, but it worked. The Germans broke off the assault. Firing became sporadic, and the surviving troops began sliding and running down the hill. Maquisards shot at the retreating soldiers, who took cover on the way down behind the corpses of their fallen comrades.
By the middle of the afternoon, only an occasional gunshot sounded. Some of the German soldiers held a position less than a quarter of the way up the hill. Most were back down by the road, sheltered by the roadblock or by two smoldering feldgrau trucks that evidently had been destroyed by the guerrillas there.
As sundown approached, Jean Claude expected the Germans to depart as they had done the day before. Instead, the mortar and heavy machine-gun fire started up again. A few German soldiers started back up the hill, but not nearly as many as before. Jean Claude had a bad suspicion.
His fear was confirmed when he heard firing behind him. German soldiers had crept around into the woods on the back side of the hill and were coming up from that direction. If not for the sentries posted there, the surprise would have been complete.
Jean Claude called for reinforcements and dashed toward the sound of firing. German soldiers had made it well up the slope, almost unopposed. Jean Claude and his men joined the sentries, took cover, and opened fire. They were badly overextended, but they managed to drive the soldiers off. As the sun went down, the shooting stopped.
Then Jean Claude heard a most welcome sound. It was the little truck, returning from the DZ. The runner had loaded it up with ammunition, more grenades, even some reinforcements—and, best of all, food and drink.
The runner also brought good news: He reported that the DZ was almost completely cleared. By midday tomorrow, he said, it would be an empty field, and there would no longer be any need to hold the road. Jean Claude began to consider a new course of action while he oversaw the distribution of the food and drink and placed the new men in the area of the last attack. He told the runner to take some wounded men back to the DZ in the truck, and then return with more supplies, and more reinforcements if possible.
The news from the DZ, and the provisions, were a huge boost to morale. The men had had nothing to eat or drink all day. The truck had brought some water, but far more wine and cider, in small casks and bottles. Jean Claude was a bit concerned at the thought of thirsty men drinking wine like water, but he noticed no ill effects.
He needn’t have worried. The maquisards, living in the woods for so long, had periodically suffered outbreaks of waterborne diseases. For many of them, the only safe liquid for years had been wine.
When it was dark, Jean Claude slipped down the hill again to confer with the maquisard leaders by the road. They all agreed that with the DZ nearly cleared, they should disengage the next day. But they had to figure out how—this kind of fighting was new to most of them. They worked out a plan to spread out and fall back in stages, with groups of men retreating under covering fire, then turning around to provide cover for those they had passed. They made decisions about positions, routes, and timing. As Jean Claude, up on the ridgeline, would have the best overall view, he was to give the signal: the detonation of several blocks of plastic explosive, which made a distinctive boom.
Once the arrangements were agreed upon, Jean Claude climbed back to his position. He drank some wine. In the quiet dark, he was overcome by exhaustion, but he also felt a certain ease. He had been frightened all day, especially during the mortar attack. But he had survived, and he had not panicked. Perhaps influenced by the wine, he felt something like happiness. He slept.