A Troubled Peace (17 page)

Patsy's brothers set off a string of cherry bombs, whooping and hollering at the Independence Day specials.
Henry jumped, startled. Deep in his mind, he heard an echo of machine-gun fire,
rat-tat-tat
, but it was only a momentary burst, like heat lightning and thunder of a receding storm.

Did you think I would allow you to escape?

Henry looked around at all the faces he loved best and pushed the ghost away.
I beat you, you SOB. I'm home.

Henry turned to Pierre to explain the Fourth of July tradition. But then he saw the expression on Pierre's face. Pierre was terrified, shaking all over.

“You, boys,” Clayton barked. “That's enough. Go on home now with those noisemakers! Want to stop my hens from laying?” Henry could tell the move wasn't Clayton's usual fun-spoiling. He was watching Pierre as well.

Patsy stood to shoo off her brothers.

Henry put his hand on Pierre's shoulder to help steady him. “It's all right, Pierre. Ease down,” he spoke softly. “I know what you're thinking. But there are no Nazis here. You're safe.
Tranquille.
Look at me.
Regarde-moi
.”

Pierre looked. Those huge solemn eyes looked through Henry, seeing other things, other places. But slowly, the focus came to Henry's face. Slowly, he stopped trembling.

Lilly stood in the kitchen door, watching. There were tears on her face. She nodded at Henry, knowing. “We shouldn't take him to the fireworks,” she said. “Next year.
Then he will really enjoy them.” She turned to Patsy to suggest the party should end, but Patsy was already preparing to follow her brothers home.

Henry caught her up in a good-bye hug. She whispered in his ear, “Come over later. After we get home from watching the fireworks, okay?”

“You got it,” Henry promised.

Clayton was still watching Pierre. Squinty-eyed, he twisted his mouth around. Henry knew that look. It meant Clayton was chewing on some thought. “You play marbles, boy?”

It was the one game Clayton had ever played with Henry and the only thing Henry had ever beaten his dad at. Given the stash of marbles Henry had seen under Pierre's bench in Paris, he'd bet good money that Pierre would take Clayton to the cleaners. What better way for Pierre to earn some respect fast from the old man?

Henry looked down at Pierre and asked him.
“Joues aux billes avec mon père?”

A little glimmer came to Pierre eyes and he pulled their lucky marble from his pocket. He asked Henry if he really should.

“Oh yeah.” Henry grinned. “For sure.
C'est une idée superbe!”
Henry turned to Clayton. “Yes,
Pierre
plays marbles.”

 

An hour later, after Pierre had won a pile of marbles, Clayton called it quits.

Worried that being skunked by a nine-year-old would annoy Clayton, Henry softened Pierre's victory: “It's a lucky shooter, Dad.”

“Naw.” Clayton stuck out his lower lip, considering the match. “It was skill. Wasn't that the shooter you won off me?”

Henry was stunned that Clayton recognized it. “You know, Dad, I carried that marble with me on my missions, for good luck. It was a way to tie me to home.”

Clayton swallowed hard, blinked, and rubbed his nose. “Yeah?” He kept looking forward.

“Yeah.”

Clayton cleared his throat. “Come on out to the barn. I've got something to show you.”

Henry followed Clayton, figuring he was in for a lecture about a new plow or a show-and-tell about some tractor he'd rehabilitated. An ace mechanic, Clayton could make any old piece of junk hum. He'd taught Henry a lot, he'd have to admit. Henry would try to listen.

The sun was setting, spilling rosy light along the grass. Swallows darted, swooped, climbed, pirouetted in the air chasing bugs—the prettiest hunters of the earth. A mother quail called her babies in to shelter for the night.
“Bob-white,” she whistled. “Bob-bob-white,” little voices answered. It sure was good to be home.

Clayton hurled his weight against the large sliding door that opened up almost the entire wall of the barn. Henry threw his shoulder into it, too, and then stepped back, wondering what in the world needed the barn opened up that much.

He caught his breath. Inside was the Curtiss Jenny biplane that he'd wrecked. But it was fixed—ready to fly again.

He couldn't help it. He hugged Clayton, hugged him hard and swung him around.

“Here now!” Clayton shrugged him off. But then he laughed and shook his head. “Darn fool thing, son, for me to bother with. But I figure you can crop dust to earn some money before you go on to college this fall. Time for you to go. Your mother and I will keep the boy. He looks like he knows a thing or two about farms.”

“You can't overwork him, Dad, not like…” Henry stopped himself from criticizing Clayton for how hard he'd worked Henry. “Not like we had to do in the Depression, Dad.”

“No. He needs some healing time. Your Ma says so. You can help me harvest the corn before you go off.”

They stood silently, gazing together at the gleaming flying machine. Clayton was the one to break the silence.
“You know, I kind of liked working on it. I liked the sound her struts made when the wind caught them.”

Henry grinned. Well, the old man wasn't such a stone after all. “You want to go up with me, Dad?”

Clayton turned to Henry. “Not me, son. I get why flying means so much to you. But it's not for me. Each man has something that keeps him aloft. For me, it's your mother.” He crossed his arms and very slowly, making sure Henry followed his gaze, Clayton looked across the fields toward Patsy's farm. Then he clapped Henry's shoulder and walked back to the house, calling over his shoulder that he and Lilly would get Pierre to bed.

 

Laughing, lighthearted, Henry lit out across the fields. He felt his heart lift, catching the wind. He was ready to begin again, to take flight once more.

He reached Patsy's house just as her brothers were tumbling in the door, shouting about the colors and the noise of the fireworks display. He said a quick, barely polite hello to her parents. Then Henry grabbed Patsy's hands to pull her away, past the square of lights cast through the house windows onto the grass, where their feet kicked up the scent of twilight dew.

He handed her the only gift he'd been able to purchase, a book of postcards of paintings in the Louvre. He pointed to the one of
Mona Lisa
. “Her eyes do follow
you around the room, Pats, just like you said.” He kissed her gently. “Just like my eyes will always follow you.” He stopped himself from adding, “if you will let me.” That kind of question, about their future together, needed to wait a little, until they were both ready. But he did have another one.

“I have something to ask you,” he said.

Patsy pulled in her breath, sharp. He could feel her hands begin to tremble ever so slightly. “Yes? I'm ready.”

“Dance the skies with me?”

For just a moment, disappointment shadowed her beautiful freckled face. That wasn't the question she'd expected. But then a small smile slid onto Patsy's lips and grew into a radiant grin, that tomboy grin Henry had always loved. “Wait? Are you serious? Go up in that plane your dad rigged?”

“Yeah. Wanna?”

“I've never been in a plane before, Henry,” she whispered, breathy, awed with the idea.

“I know. Wanna come?”

She nodded, bouncing on her tiptoes.

“Grab a sweater. It's cold in the clouds.”

Patsy darted away and back, beaming.

Henry clasped her hand and they ran, shouting, rejoicing, falling down and pulling one another up to skip on, like children.

 

On laughter-silvered wings, topping the windswept heights, Henry showed Patsy how to touch the face of God.

W
ar ends, and the battle for peace begins.

Nations must establish true, cooperative treaties with former enemies. New governments must be formed among competing political ideologies and leaders more accustomed to fighting than negotiating. Cities, railways, ports, bridges, schools, and hospitals must be rebuilt. Farms, long neglected or destroyed, must be replanted. Banks must be replenished and reopened.

Survivors must find loved ones lost during panicked flight from oncoming armies, nurse the wounded or
starved back to health, and bury their dead. Returning soldiers must ease down from battle readiness, shedding the quick-flash aggression that kept them alive under fire. They must accept what they have done and seen. War criminals must be tried in a civilized, judicial court. Lesser criminals—the weak, the passive, the followers—must be pardoned and left alone.

These are tall orders for countries and individuals alike. The hatred, suspicion, and bitter vengeance forged in the firestorms of war do not die down easily. That is especially true when a conflict is long lasting and far-flung, as was World War II.

 

World War II lasted six years and embroiled more than 50 nations. Death toll estimates go as high as 70 million, but the most scholarly sources estimate that a staggering 55 million people were killed, most of them civilians. In Europe alone, the Nazis methodically exterminated 14 million persons Hitler deemed “racial inferiors”: Poles, Slavs, gypsies, and six million Jews.

In France, 211,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen were lost, but so, too, were 400,000 civilians. These children, women, and men died in battle bombardments, from land mines left by Nazis, in executions, in massacres in retaliation for Resistance work, from deportation, and, tragically, in Allied bombings designed to liberate them.
France was the largest supplier of manpower and finished goods to Hitler's Germany. To win the war, the Allies had to destroy its production of ball bearings, tires, and other such items used for Nazi tanks, planes, and ships. No matter how careful Allied bomber crews were to drop their load “right in the pickle barrel,” the explosions often spread beyond targeted factories, supply depots, or railway junctions. In May 1944, for instance, the Allies flew 1,284 raids over France. In one two-day period, 6,000 French persons perished.

After the war ended, five million French were left displaced.” Many were homeless refugees, their towns in ruins from the village-by-village battle for liberation. In places like Caen, for instance, only 400 of its 1,800 buildings were left standing. Others struggled to return from the concentration and labor camps to which they had been deported by Nazis and fellow Frenchmen.

Rage at French collaboration with Hitler is what continued the nation's internal strife after its liberation in late 1944. A large number of French citizens—from industrial giants to ordinary shopkeepers or small-town mayors—had willingly cooperated with the Nazis and its puppet Vichy government. Some did so because they agreed with Hitler's racism and anti-Semitism. Others cooperated because of fear or greed or a lust for power. With the help of such collaborators, 76,000 French Jews were rounded
up and sent to concentration camps. A mere 3 percent survived. Also deported were 85,000 Resistance members and “political undesirables” (socialists, communists, and other radicals). Only half returned.

Most of these victims had been reported to the Nazis and the French Milice by their neighbors or coworkers, people they knew.

In retaliation for such betrayals, collaborators were attacked as D-day armies landed. In what the French called the
épuration sauvage
, “the savage purge,” about 10,000 people were executed without trial. Thousands of women were shaved by mobs in punishment for their perceived romances with German soldiers. Tragically, some were
maquis
fighters who had befriended Germans in order to spy on them for the Resistance. They could not convince enraged crowds of the patriotism of their playacting. Vigilante-style attacks escalated in 1945 as concentration camps were liberated and a tidal wave of “absents” flooded back into France—broken, emaciated, deathly sick—carrying tales of horrifying atrocities that shocked and inflamed the country.

It took incredible bravery and commitment to peace to stand for forgiveness, for healing, during this time. Yet many did. One woman, whose husband died in Buchenwald for his Resistance work, served briefly as her village's mayor and counted her largest accomplishment as being the fact
that no female was shaved during her watch.

Hunger ravaged Europe. The Allies sent massive shipments of foods, but until Hitler was defeated, the majority of supplies went to troops on the front lines. Once the peace accord was signed, relief efforts began in earnest, spurred by slogans like: “Let's finish the job.” In May 1945, for instance, the U.S. Air Corps flew 400 emergency flights over the Netherlands, dropping more than 800 tons of K-rations for the starving Dutch. The British also dropped tons of powdered milk, eggs, and chocolate. Church groups across the United States organized clothing drives with the same gusto American youths had scrounged old pans for scrap metal for bombs during the war. In one day a Catholic church in Richmond collected 2,416 useable garments; in a week a West Coast synagogue collected 10,000 pounds of coats.

But even with such aid coming in, the infrastructure to deliver food and clothes was nonexistent. Most French railroads, bridges, and canals were destroyed. Coal had to be mined to run what trains were working, but there was nothing to transport the coal to the stations.

In this void, some seized the opportunity to make fortunes selling food and stolen Allied goods on the black market. Sometimes they exploited age-old tensions between France's farmers and city dwellers, the peasants' resentment of the urban rich, to convince them to risk
selling their crops illegally on the black market rather than through government channels. And certainly the differences in profits were tempting. The French government-controlled markets could pay 3,000 francs for a cow, for instance, while a farmer could sell the same animal for 18,000 francs on the black market.

Establishing a legal, reliable market for food, then, was the biggest challenge facing the French in 1945. A report written by the new United Nations in March of that year found that many Europeans were trying to survive on a diet of 1,000 calories a day. (Between 2,000 and 2,500 a day is considered healthy, while the typical American will consume 5,000 calories at a single Thanksgiving meal.) The rate of malnutrition illnesses—like rickets, which bows the bones of children who don't have enough milk to drink—skyrocketed. The French tried to establish food priorities for returning “absents” and growing children. Even so, given the shortages, these allowances were paltry compared to what we enjoy today. Each French child from newborn to age three was guaranteed only one dried banana, for example, for the year of 1945. Food riots and demonstrations became common, such as the time 4,000 mothers marched on the Ministry of Supply at the Hôtel de Ville, shouting, “Milk for our little ones.”

Faced with so many hurdles, political friction among the French started immediately. There was an uneasy alliance
between predominantly communist and socialist Resistance fighters, or
maquis
, and General Charles de Gaulle, who headed the Free French army—soldiers who had escaped to England or North Africa when France fell to regroup and fight with the Allies. While their common goal was to liberate the nation, they coordinated their efforts well. Together, after D-day, they stabilized town and regional governments and controlled the purge, sending 40,000 collaborators to jail as opposed to their being killed on the street.

But the
maquis
and de Gaulle did not trust one another. De Gaulle often underplayed how important the Resistance had been during the war, and the
maquis
responded that they risked their lives in covert actions while he sat safely in London making plans. De Gaulle was more traditional and nationalistic in his thinking than the more radical
maquis
, who hoped to create a new social order as they rebuilt France. De Gaulle wanted a strong and independent France, a republic free of any outside political influences—America, Britain, or Soviet communism.

One way for de Gaulle to accomplish that was to create a sense of French pride and cohesiveness, a national myth—that France was united during the war and that the overwhelming majority of French bravely resisted the occupation. At Paris's liberation de Gaulle droned: “Paris broken! Paris martyrized! But Paris liberated! Liberated
by itself, by its own people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and aid of France as a whole, of fighting France….” Rarely did de Gaulle mention the Resistance or the Allies in his speeches, even as his soldiers paraded with tanks and trucks provided by the United States.

De Gaulle repeatedly pardoned collaborators that the maquis-controlled courts condemned; he commuted 73 percent of all death sentences. (He was not lenient on journalists or military officers, those who influenced others.) De Gaulle did this to push the country forward and to keep businesses running and local governments intact, operating with less offensive ex-Vichy bureaucrats. It also slowed the
maquis
' growing influence in the new government. He alienated many during “the Return” of the deportees by declaring: “The time for tears is over. The time for glory has returned.” (It was not until 1954 that France established a day to commemorate the deported.) Although a war hero, de Gaulle's standing among the people was also marred by the horrendous food shortages and his failure to mention how he planned to provide them butter in his long speeches about “eternal France.” Instead, the “battle for beef” was waged mostly by socialist reformers and committees of angry housewives. Ultimately, de Gaulle and the Resistance had difficulty governing together. As a result,
de Gaulle withdrew from politics in 1946. But, in 1958, he returned to power, helping to reorganize France into its Fifth Republic, to end its war in Algiers, and to serve as its president until 1969, overseeing a decade of great economic growth for France.

 

The Cold War—the nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States—began the instant Germany collapsed. Stalin immediately absorbed Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia into the Soviet Communist bloc, behind his “iron curtain.” His persecution of certain Eastern European ethnic groups was as bad as Hitler's. Stalin ruthlessly eliminated those who spoke out against his policies. The estimates of how many people died under his repressive regime—executed or sent to Gulag labor camps in Siberia—vary. But a conservative figure is 20 million.

Our understandable distrust of Stalin and his Soviet Union's brutal communism was so strong, the United States and Great Britain would secretly use notorious Gestapo like Klaus Barbie to spy on the Soviets because their intelligence gathering had been so precise during the war. Barbie had been headquartered in southern France, in Lyon, where Resistance groups were strong. Under his command, 7,500 people were deported, and 4,342 murdered. Barbie was so cruel in his interrogations and fanatical in his hunting of
the
maquis
and Jews, the French called him “the butcher of Lyon.” He was the officer who insisted on tracking down and executing the 44 Jewish children, aged four to 17, whom Sabine Zlatin had hidden in Izieu.

For ten years after the war, Barbie ran an anticommunist spy network for British and American intelligence communities in Germany and France. When the French realized he still lived and sought to arrest him, the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) helped him escape to Bolivia. In 1987, he was finally brought to trial and sentenced to life for crimes against humanity.

 

Yes, Madame Zlatin, the manager of the Lutetia's deportation center, existed. (She lived to testify against Barbie.) My portrayal of the Vercors's
le patron
, Father Gagnol, and “the bearded” priest are based on the real people. The Vercors
maquis
, desperate for trained soldiers, did liberate 52 Senegalese soldiers from a Nazi garrison, and risked a raid into Grenoble headquarters to steal plaster to set the broken arm of an SOE officer. The Vercors was crushed, their brave citizens “exterminated” in the gruesome manners described, and worse. One of the few prisoners the Nazis spared was the young OSS officer from South Carolina. They typically showed more mercy to Americans than to the French, whom Hitler hated.

Paris was indeed a hotbed of political excitement and
idealistic dreams following the war. New ways of governing were enthusiastically debated over pâté and brie in the cafés of the city's Saint Germain-de-Prés quarter. French philosophers and writers—Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir—were daily regulars at the Café des Deux Magots and Café Flore. Parisians gathered to listen to them—especially Camus, whose underground newspaper,
Combat
, had been such an inspirational voice during the Resistance. Painter Pablo Picasso was also a large presence in Paris at the time, adding his voice to the French communist movement.

French women were granted the vote for the first time in 1944. As the country was liberated town by town, women often became mayors or other officials until the 1.5 million French POWs could be released and come home to govern. Activists like the fictional character Claudette, emboldened by their work in the Resistance, campaigned for new feminist laws and permanent seats in legislatures. In October 1945, 33 women were elected to the Constituent Assembly, which wrote France's new constitution. Called “the Glorious 33,” nineteen had been in the Resistance, seven were arrested and imprisoned, and three survived Ravensbruck.

Well-known authors and war correspondents—like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell—were in Paris as
well, staying at the Hotel Scribe. Hemingway made an early entrance into the city during its fight for liberation, and gleefully joined in the roundups of what Nazis remained. George Orwell was in and out of Paris throughout the spring of 1945. He filed nineteen dispatches on the war for the
London Observer
and
Manchester Evening News
. He was definitely in town on VE day, and carried a Colt .32 that Hemingway gave him. Sadly, Orwell's wife had just died and would not see the publication of his groundbreaking satire of Stalin's collectivist farms—
Animal Farm
—in August 1945. Orwell died of tuberculosis five years later.