Four of us will be going: Rémi has come round to the idea, and two brothers, farmhands in their life before the war, have joined. They’re all thick shoulders and arms, big guts. The older, Maurice, a dimple in his chin, reminds me of Father. He has the same slow rumble of a laugh. The younger, Laurent, skinnier and darker, would follow him anywhere.
Rémi has approached the task in typically fastidious fashion, dismantling his chair to make a sledge for our belongings and bartering with prisoners for the things we might need. I think I thought I could just punch my way out, but then what? Rémi has planned it, an earnest look, one finger on the dusty floor as he charts our moves. The brothers have arranged to pay the guard on the gate, a man with a weakness for beer and a certain brothel in the town, who can be trusted to be asleep, or on patrol elsewhere: we have the timings. It feels real and, as the day approaches, my whole body fizzes with anticipation.
We are getting out, returning home, rejoining the war.
The evening has been spent in twitchy silence, barely daring to look at each other, as if the guards might be able to translate the slight widening of our eyes, the knowing nod, the small raise of an eyebrow. We are heading to a nearby farm building and from there south as quickly as we can.
The night is thick with expectation, muggy and close. I lie on top of my bedclothes staring at the uneven lumps of the ceiling, one hand resting under my head. Rémi sits on his cot, foot tapping, eyes now flicking to the door as if he expects a guard to appear as a black silhouette, light behind him, hands on hips and discover us. Footsteps on the wooden floorboards, a distant sound of keys, has his eyes darting to the door, him starting to his feet.
When the whole bunk-room is breathing evenly, the only sounds outside the odd hoot, a rustle, it is time. I get up, stripping the sheet from my bed in one slick movement. Rémi’s has caught and he tugs at it, his thin arms pale in the darkness. I touch his arm and take the sheet from him; he gives me a weak smile, fear shining in the whites of his eyes.
Silently pushing the bed against the wall to get to the window, I barely need to touch the rotten window lock before it disintegrates in my hand. The brothers have joined us in silence, rising from their beds without a noise, their faces set, identical expressions on their faces. Standing on the bed, we place the makeshift sledge on the ledge, a knotted bed sheet acting as a rope, and gradually lower it inch by inch, listening for sounds outside, feeling the slow bump, bump of the sledge against the stone outside. Pausing to peek out over the edge I am shocked by the blackness of the night, barely making out the white of the sheet only a couple of metres below.
I help hoist Rémi up to the ledge. He balances, my hand on the small of his back, his legs dangling down as he looks at the ground below, then back at me. I nod at him. His Adam’s apple bobs once, twice, before he makes the leap. My stomach plummets with him as his close-cropped auburn head disappears. A small cry as both feet hit the dirt, followed by a whispered ça va.
The youngest brother goes next: we haul him up and watch him disappear too. I don’t need to help Maurice: he lifts his body onto the ledge in one fluid movement, hunching to get out of the window that now seems so tiny against his bulk.
Palms sweaty, I follow them, hauling myself up onto the ledge, my arms noticeably weaker – how easy I would have found the same move a couple of years before.
Rémi has skirted the side of the building and is now moving out into the courtyard, a scuff of stones as he gingerly makes his way across. Lifting my leg onto the ledge, pausing to strain and listen, I make out his figure in the patchy dark, his outline barely there, one skinny arm pulling the sledge to the gate beyond, a thin segment of moon not enough to give him away. The night air is still and rain falls like a gentle mist.
Turning back I pick up my bag and look over the room: our beds, hastily stripped of the sheets, now just ghostly lumps; the door, an uneven crack showing the faintest light beyond which a guard might be sitting, slumped, head in hand on the night shift. Can it really be over?
I go to jump, Rémi now a hundred yards away. As I do, a light suddenly fires up from the fence to my right. Then another. And Rémi is lit up in the middle of the courtyard holding the knotted sheet of the sledge in one slack hand as a third torch finds him. Frozen, I can only watch as whistles blow and he looks left and right as the guards descend on him in a rush of frenzied shouts. They knew, they knew we were going!
As the brothers make a dash for it across the courtyard shots ring out; I hear shouts – Rémi’s voice – and as I look over the ledge again I see two bodies, half in light, half in shadow, legs crooked, heads bent, dark stains collecting around them.
I feel all the air leave my lungs as I duck back down. A torch sweeps towards me, a foot above and below me, the moving light flashing past the square of window and highlighting the long cracks in the plaster of the ceiling, scars in a bluish light. I lean my forehead against the wall, waiting for a moment, and then look over again. Rémi is being taken away by a guard, the cone of light from the torch on the ground in front of them. The guards have brought stretchers for the other two, so still.
I persuaded him, this boy who wanted to go back to work, make paper, who played women in plays and laughed like a twelve-year-old with no cares in the world; this boy, who hadn’t wanted to leave; this boy, who in this moment is so much braver than I. He is marched away, not even throwing a look over his shoulder at me, his chair sledge a grey silhouette left out in the dark.