In This Hospitable Land (59 page)

Ida slipped the message into her school bag. She doubted she would run into anyone along the way but if she did she could always say she was returning to school after lunch. No one would know her mother had let her take off school for Cristian’s birthday.

Curiously she was to deliver the message to her principal. Nobody had even suspected he was part of the Resistance.

He startled when she knocked at his office door and asked if she could speak to him alone as she had been instructed to do.

“You know what this is?” he asked after reading the communiqué.

Ida told him she didn’t because her mother had told her not to look. So he explained that General Eisenhower had sent messages just like it to resisters all over Europe encouraging them to redouble their efforts in the fight for victory.

“Is that good?” Ida asked, not really understanding.

“Very good, little one,” the principal replied, laughing heartily. “It means we’ll end the war soon. Thank you for doing your part.”

Shyly Ida asked, “Can I go home now? It’s my little brother’s birthday.”

“Of course,” the principal said, laughing again. “You’ve had your lesson for the day.”

The pace was picking up. At the end of May, Alex and André were called from Le Tronc to Champdemergue. Léon grunted when the brothers headed out again but the planting was done and the workload would be light until harvesttime.

Alex hadn’t stayed in a Resistance camp for months. Training had taken on a far more serious tone. The sense of anticipation was tremendous. Everyone knew the Allied invasion was days away because a BBC broadcast from London the night of June first included a coded message to that effect intended for Resistance fighters.

But what if the Germans had broken the code? That was the older resistants’ concern. The young men who shared a feeling of invincibility—the prerogative and bane of youth—had no qualms or doubts about the outcome.

They also shared other rumors, such as the one about a new German rocket, the V-2, crash-landing near the Bug River east of Warsaw. Polish Resistance fighters supposedly recovered and hid the missile’s remains before German forces could arrive to gather evidence that could help their scientists learn from the failure. To the youthful Maquisards such stories constituted proof that Resistance forces scattered around the world were strong, confident, and ready to finish off the Third Reich.

Charles de Gaulle seemed to share the youths’ expectations. The day of the coded broadcast from London, the French Committee of National Liberation based in Algiers proclaimed itself the Provisional Government of the French Republic.

Sometimes the Sauverin brothers thought the young people were on to something. After all, the Resistance pretty much possessed the mountains of the Cévennes. Collaborators were being eliminated systematically. The Germans and the Milice did control the principal roads but nothing else. Maintaining power over those highly visible roadways left them exposed to the Maquis, who bided their time with less and less patience.

On Sunday, June fourth—one day before the longed-for offensive—something went very wrong. Reports trickled into Champdemergue about widespread coordinated efforts by the Milice to round up Resistance fighters. Then they flooded in.

By mid-afternoon the camp commander ordered a full-scale mobilization. Every available Maquisard, including the Sauverins, loaded up with weapons and ammunition and marched off to the nearby village of La Rivière. Three trucks of Milice and Wehrmacht soldiers had been dispatched to capture the mayor because the Milice had uncovered one of the best-kept secrets in the Lozère: La Rivière’s mayor was in charge of all of the region’s Resistance forces.

But the progress of enemy trucks was monitored meter by meter since a train happened to be running along the same route. An alert train conductor—by a stroke of luck one of many who worked with the Resistance—had caught sight of the caravan and intuited its destination. At each station stop he called in to report the trucks’ progress. At one he deputized children he knew as liaisons and messengers to bring word of the coming trouble to the mayor.

When the trucks arrived the mayor was nowhere to be found. Neither were any of the villagers able or willing to suggest reliably where he might be. Some said one place, others said another, and still more pretended they didn’t know what mayor the Milice were talking about. The enraged Milice heatedly announced their intention to return that afternoon. If the mayor did not come back to turn himself over to them they would burn down the village.

The inhabitants quickly devised a simple plan for self-preservation. All the women and children prepared and left immediately, carrying precious possessions on their backs and driving their flocks of goats and sheep ahead of them to the crest where they could hide in isolated abandoned buildings. Meanwhile the town’s farmers mobilized to fight and sent word to Vimbouches and Champdemergue seeking reinforcements.

Marching along, the Sauverin brothers realized they might soon become engaged in an actual firefight. Alex could barely contain his excitement. André still wondered what he would do.

When the Maquisards of Vimbouches and Champdemergue converged on the outskirts of La Rivière, the farmers cheered. Gathered at the entrance to the village—where the road made an abrupt turn to avoid a massive boulder, considered the town’s founding stone—several farmers chopped at trees, hoping to fell them and block the road entirely. At Roger Boudon’s command Alex and several of the younger Maquisards joined them.

Then the farmers and Resistance fighters posted themselves on the upper side of the road, taking cover behind chestnut trees and rocks. Alex and André positioned themselves side-by-side in back of a hedge. The wait seemed interminable. Alex was anxious finally to take action against the hated Milice and their Wehrmacht compatriots.

After a long, nervous time, everyone heard the distant sound of engines approaching. Tensing as they raised their weapons and sighted along the road, the Resistance fighters knew to hold their fire until the chief whistled. But did the farmers know the signal? And how likely were they to maintain discipline when they saw their hometown invaded?

Alex’s heart rate rose and a bead of sweat trickled down his brow when he spotted the first truck. At that moment a single shot rang out—from where? There was no way to know and no time to care.

That first round struck home, hitting the driver just as the truck started into the big turn. The driver slumped and the truck veered wildly, crashing forcefully into the founding stone.

The driver of the second truck spun its steering wheel desperately to avoid a pileup. He succeeded but ran up onto the edge of the road, pitching the truck violently on its side and tossing out all its passengers.

Trying to avoid his predecessors’ fate, the third truck’s driver slammed on the brakes. Their great shriek was drowned out by a massive fusillade.

Before the Milice and the German soldiers inside that last truck could figure out what was happening a hail of bullets rained death down upon them. Had the chief whistled? Alex hadn’t heard it but the time to hesitate had passed. Like all the others he rose to advance on the enemy. This was the most thrilling moment of his life.

But where was André?

For André it all unfolded like a dream. He felt the rifle in his hands. Bullets exploded and whistled furiously through the air, penetrating the third truck’s side as if it were made of paper. André heard screaming, saw raggedly dressed men racing and uniformed men escaping. Their faces were contorted with terror.

Some bloodied, some with broken limbs, the escapees stomped and stumbled over fallen comrades—the dead and those too seriously wounded to flee. Trying to outrun their doom they raced toward the bushes along the river followed hotly by outraged Maquisards and farmers—and, more slowly, by dazed André, who watched in time-lapse horror as one after another of the enemy was gunned down before his unblinking eyes. Then André watched the long high arc of a well-aimed hand grenade flying as if in slow motion and exploding fearsomely amidst the last few Milice, putting a loud smoke-filled end to them and their feeble return fire.

That couldn’t have lasted more than a minute,
André thought helplessly, struggling through the sulfurous atmosphere, snapped back into real time by a coughing fit.

Everything had gone well—if killing several dozen men could be called good. Unable to see Alex, André vacillated between feelings of anger, pride, and self-recrimination as he tried to comprehend his participation in this action. Though his finger had hardly touched let alone twitched his rifle’s trigger he felt fully implicated.

As the smoke began to clear, André saw villagers and Maquis laboring mightily to eliminate all signs of battle. However unsettled, he realized he needed to lend a hand.

Slinging his unused rifle over his shoulder, he didn’t know why they needed to make it seem this dreadful event had never occurred. The Allied invasion would begin in a matter of hours so how likely was the German commandant at Florac to bother sending out a reconnaissance group for this missing convoy? He would be preoccupied and might not even find out about it before he and his men were engulfed in far more urgent matters.

But the road needed to be cleared no matter what. And the dead needed to be buried.

The overturned truck was righted and all three vehicles were loaded with corpses. By André’s count there were thirty-eight Milice and German soldiers dead and—mercifully—only one Maquis.

The bullet-riddled third truck was used to pull the other two to a cul-de-sac off of the forest road. A trench was dug quickly and the enemy bodies were dumped into a common grave. The young resistant was accorded his own resting place in tribute.

André hadn’t known him well but had admired him—a Pole drafted into the German army against his will as he had insisted frequently and angrily. When the chance presented itself he had deserted to fight with the Resistance. Now André offered up an unvoiced prayer for the poor boy’s soul.

Walking back from the burial site, André found the celebratory shouts and cheers of the victors gross and unseemly. He still could not reconcile his beliefs with what he had done. He understood that this had been an instance of “kill or be killed,” but what could such easy self-justification mean to a man with a vision of a world far better than this one and the will—no, the need—to help make it? Yet he was aware that he lived on Earth and not in heaven. Accommodations were required to make the best of an unfortunate lot.

With every step he felt not better but more resigned and more resolved. Those who would perpetrate heinous and violent acts against the innocent must be stopped. There was honor as well as shame in taking up arms against outrageous fortune.

All too soon he returned to the scene of the firefight where the triumphant hastened to erase the last traces—the terrible burn marks on the boulder. He found Alex again, scrubbing and scraping at the massive stained rock. André joined in. The two brothers worked and sweated together until the job was done.

They said not a word but a great deal was communicated between them. Both had been alternately exhilarated and deeply saddened by this baptism by blood.

Denise was folding Maquisard laundry when the mailman arrived unexpectedly. On Monday he had appeared with the unhappy news that the invasion hadn’t begun as planned. But on Wednesday the news was so good he made a special trip to let Denise, Irene, and Ernestine know Operation Overlord had commenced at last the day before.

Details swirled in Denise’s mind as she and the girls hiked back to Champdemergue with resistants’ clothes. On Sunday—the day Rome had fallen to the Allies after the bloody battles of Monte Cassino and Anzio—Expeditionary Force convoys already bound for Normandy were called back due to rough seas and bad weather over the Channel. But Tuesday: Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, Utah…British, American, Canadian, Polish, and Free French forces…Thousands of ships and planes…Fifteen thousand aerial sorties…More than one hundred fifty thousand men…

Entering the Resistance camp, Denise felt jubilant. Understanding something good was happening, Ida and Christel skipped, danced, and laughed. But it didn’t take long to realize how somberly the Maquisards returned their greetings.