THE POINT OF PLAYING a game is to win. To fight hard, to play fairly, but to win. Otherwise, what on earth is the use? Defeat kills a great athlete. Defeat is numbing. It silences a dressing room after a game, renders everyone speechless. Defeat is humbling, obscene.
But victory is sweet. When you also play well in a game it is sweeter. Every man in that minibus from young Helmut Herberger to the veteran Otto Schoen had played a part in the triumph. Each one was elated. Each one had given his best. Had they not beaten a better team, stopped young Varin and held him to a single goal?
Inter of Milan couldn’t do that! Nor Real of Madrid, either!
How quickly, when one wins, the aches and pains, the bone weariness, the bruises, and the hurts are forgotten. They sat there, not singing and cheering as their teammates were doing ahead in the larger bus, which was now almost lost on the horizon, but suffused in happiness. Each man savored the moments, remembering that pass, that stop, that last final team rush downfield. Yes, they were a team, by God; they had played as a team, won as a team. As they had done all year in Germany against the rest of the league, as they had done against Torpedo Dynamo of Moscow and Chelsea Bridge of London. The world was warm. The world always is when you want badly to win and finally do.
They rode in silence: dependable Otto, Sepp Obermeyer, with a bruise across his forehead, Helmut Herberger, Schroeder, the centre forward, his blond hair standing straight up after the shower he had taken in the hotel, and the baron, exhausted, slumped in his seat. They were happy, relaxed, anxious only to get out of France and reach home. The straight road led along the coast as far as they could see, winding up and along the dunes and cliffs and headlands in the distance. The larger bus by this time was so far ahead it had vanished. They were alone.
Soon they passed concrete blockhouses that once, long ago, had been part of Rommel’s famous Atlantic wall. Some were now tilted upward at weird angles, their guns pointing harmlessly at the sky. Others were mounds of rubble. Still others were untouched, remaining exactly as they were when their garrisons filed out with hands behind heads in surrender twenty years before.
The players watched them slip past uneasily. This was a defeat they preferred to ignore.
They went up a hill. The sea was smooth and calm in the evening light of June. Then the minibus rolled into a village of one street, the children parting in the road to watch it go by. All at once the bus slowed, groaned, stopped dead.
The driver shook his head in exasperation. “Ah, that damned magneto again.”
He opened the door, got down, and raised the hood in the rear. Immediately a crowd of youngsters gathered to watch. Behind the driver the players rose, stretched, and filed slowly into the street. The last man out was the baron. You could tell how stiff and sore he was by the careful way he left the bus, how he held the door handle as he descended.
Ernst, the driver, was now underneath the vehicle, and Sepp, who knew engines, was leaning down and talking to him. Just ahead, beside a low seawall, was a monument. The baron walked over and looked at it.
Nothing ornate, nothing overdone, the monument was neither elaborate nor expensive. It consisted of a slab of roughly hewn granite topped by a granite arm and fist rising into space. High above the water, it must have been visible far out at sea. Silhouetted against the sky, the stone fist held a sword broken just above the hilt.
On the slab was a metal plaque. Twenty years of moisture-laden fogs had weathered it so badly that it was barely legible. The baron bent down. With difficulty he made out names of those who had been his enemies, his friends.
MORT POUR LA FRANCE
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June 5,1944
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Georges Varin, Instituteur
Le Père Clement, Prêtre
Charles Lavigne, Gérant
Louis Marquet, Agriculteur
Marcel Deschamps, Pécheur
René Le Gallec, quinze ans, Étudiant
My God, thought the baron, this is Nogent-Plage! We’re on the Grande Rue and it is the fifth of June!