Night Soldiers (41 page)

He did not intend to be captured. He did not intend to mingle with Germans. He did not intend to be “brave”—had in fact been specifically cautioned against it. He would move cautiously in daylight, at most another French face in a French countryside, and play the game at night. A few wild souls back in Virginia had been eager to crawl about and slit throats. Their time would come, but for the moment they either trained their days away or disappeared back into regular service units.

For most of the night he walked alone on the road—barely two lanes wide, with no center line—built of whitish pebbled aggregate with ragged edges bordered by tall weeds. In some places it was frost-rippled from the previous winter; in others, the lush roadside growth had cracked the paving. He saw the brief silhouette of a hunting owl. Something whispered away from his shoe through the tall grass. Then, as the moon waned, he heard a distant engine and hobbled quickly to cover. He listened intently to the two-stroke sputter of the engine and decided it was a motorcycle. He was correct. Watched the German dispatch rider go by, sighting on him with a sockbound index finger and silently mouthing
bam
just at the proper moment, then heard the sound fade into the distance in a symphony of gear changes. No need to shift that much, he thought. The German, alone on the road, was playing with his machine, lying low over the handlebars like a racing driver. But he too, leading the rider for a single perfect shot, had been playing. That would change.

What caught his attention, however, in the reality of that first, nebulous contact with the enemy, was the intimacy of it. The meaning of his job now came to him in bold letters for the first time—what he was really going to do and how it would feel to do it. Professional soldiering he respected—where would the Allies be without a corps of trained officers?—but he could never be more than an imposter in that world, his personality was not made for uniforms. He had, in civilian life, competed in a world of commonplace weapons: typewriters, telephones, perceptions, insights. In that world he had neither won nor lost, but now the battle was rejoined, with the prize for winning or the cost of losing vastly increased.

The British, believing their social system and its exigencies prepared them for clandestine life, had their doubts about the ability of the American personality to adapt to a world where nothing was quite what it seemed. Were these blunt and forthright people capable of subtlety, deception, the artful ruse? Some thought not. But they had not lived and trained with Robert Eidenbaugh and his colleagues. They did not entirely understand that the dark side of the American personality was the adventurer's side and that a time of war was the perfect climate for its flowering.

Maquis
meant “brush,” and that was pretty much the story at Cambras. In first light he'd found the chipped stone mile marker on the inner curve of the road, heard, a few minutes later, the sound of a woodcutter at work in the forest—recognition signal number one—then saw a pile of cow dung, confirming the first signal, by a dirt path that wound up the mountainside to the village.

Cambras, backlit by a cold mountain sky, was a mud square surrounded by a handful of stone cottages with tightly shuttered windows and a rust-stained fountain with a tattered hen standing motionless atop the spigot, its feathers ruffled by the breeze. There were several small, brownish dogs, who glared at him unpleasantly from a safe distance, but no people. The village smelled like damp earth and pig manure. Eidenbaugh suddenly recalled a family outing to the mountains of the Var region, north of Toulon, where at lunchtime they had encountered just such a village. He could still see the look on his mother's face as she'd said, “Not here, Arthur.”

The Cambras
maquis
trickled from the doors of the cottages and formed up, more or less, in the square. There was a period of awkward silence, then they began to introduce themselves. There were the Vau brothers, both tall and hulking with spiky blond hair, clearly the village bullies and, he thought, a little slow. Henri Veul, called Sablé—Sandy—watchful and silent, a shotgun slung, barrel down, diagonally across his back. La Brebis—the ewe—in fact Marie Bonet, a stocky, young woman whose broad forehead and tiny eyes suggested the face of a sheep. And Vigie, which meant “lookout man,” the youngest, perhaps sixteen. The Vau brothers, he thought, were no more than nineteen.

“Lucien?” It was Alceste Vau, the senior brother, who spoke.

“Oui,”
he said.

He hadn't any idea what they'd expected, but he slowly began to understand that they found him all too mortal. They were disappointed. They had probably anticipated a ten-foot-tall Texan bristling with machine guns and breathing fire.
Well
, he thought,
too bad
. They had instead a rather lean, plain young man, formerly an advertising copywriter, with a sock wound around a bloody finger and a bare right ankle.
Probably
, he thought,
we deserve each other
.

They took him into one of the houses and announced him as Lucien. Breakfast was cabbage fried with fat bacon and hunks of heavy bread washed down with cups of chicory. An older man, Gilbert, and his youngish wife served
l'Américain
and the Cambras
maquis
. After the meal, a grandmother appeared, five feet tall and swathed in black, and examined his finger, sucked her teeth in sympathy, and applied a healing paste of pounded lizards.

Finger rebound with strips of gray cloth, he headed outside to use the stone lean-to in the backyard. As he left, his host mumbled something about the American's learning to
faire le cent-onze
—to make one hundred eleven. He knew the expression, which referred to the marks of three fingers down a wall. But they laughed in vain. The parting gift of his commanding officer had been twenty squares of French newspaper, wedged in his pocket at the moment of their final handshake.

It was a war of mischief.

That became apparent in the week that followed his arrival. Gilbert, in whose house he lived, said one evening that the people of Cambras had “always hated those bastards down there.” It was the contempt of mountain people for flatlanders, and it would not have been unusual to find such sentiments in parts of Tennessee or Kentucky, similarly expressed.
Down there
meant Épinal, St.-Dié, and the small towns between.
Down there
meant tax collectors and municipal authorities and Gendarmerie and all those blood-sucking leeches who made a poor man's life a misery. Between Cambras and
down there
was a kind of truce, worked out over a long time, the flatlanders silently agreeing to bother the people of Cambras only a little, and the mountain people accepting just about that much botherment. They lived with each other—just.

When, however, you added a heavy-handed Teutonic authority to this chemistry, a certain amount of hell was bound to break loose. The people of Cambras now took it as a divine mission to bother the
schleuhs
, as they called them, while avoiding too much interest from those they called
la geste
. The Gestapo. The French version of the name carried with it a certain amount of irony—bold deed—but it was quite clear to everyone that these Gestapo people were better left alone. They had made that evident early on. Had then taken to strutting about in leather coats and tearing around the roads in Grosser Mercedes sedans.
Here we are
, they said.
Try your luck
.

So, in Cambras, until Lucien showed up, they'd had to content themselves with mischief, testing always to see what the reaction might be. A mistake was painful. When Vigie had somehow contrived to obtain a concussion grenade, Alceste Vau and the others had snuck inside the perimeter of a Panzer division encampment near Épinal and dropped it into a septic tank that served the officers' latrine—just about the time it was in full use. Judging from the noise level inside the barrack, the result had been spectacular. Fountains. And, better yet, there'd been no response from the Germans. But when Sablé had become obsessed by an obnoxious poodle—the adored pet of a headquarters
Feldwebel
, who spoke German babytalk to it on the street—and had blown the thing's fluffy head apart with an old army pistol stolen from Gilbert, the local pharmacist and his wife had been stood against a wall. Reprisal. The townspeople took the orphans in, but they had a good notion of who had done it, and Sablé had to visit relatives in another village for a time. They'd learned that angry people are dangerous, that one couldn't be sure what they'd do, especially when the means to a hard lesson were so near at hand—the right word in the right ear was all it would have taken.

In that same week, Eidenbaugh began to have a feel for the currents that ran beneath the surface of village life. There was a young girl, perhaps fifteen, who lived with Gilbert and his family. Cecille, she was called, a poor thing treated as servant or dishonored cousin by the rest of the household. Heavy, with a wan, immobile face, she stared at the floor when spoken to. She had come visiting one night, approaching his straw pallet in the corner of the eating room and standing there until he awoke, suddenly, startled by an apparition in a soiled flannel nightdress. He had sent her away—in kind fashion, he hoped—for the briefers had been crystal clear on this point, especially the aristocratic Englishman—known only as Major F.—who had lived for years in Paris. “Village life is sexually quite complex, dear boy, don't be drawn in,” the British officer had cautioned. And it soon became obvious that he'd been right. Cecille was visited, on successive nights, by Sablé and by Daniel Vau, the younger brother. Daniel, in addition, looked at Gilbert's youngish wife in a quite explicit way. Eidenbaugh hadn't any idea how Gilbert reacted to it—he seemed not to notice.

Meanwhile, he familiarized himself with his surroundings, spent a good deal of his time walking the fields and forests around Cambras, learning the trails from La Brebis and Vigie, and listening each night to the
messages personnels
on the wireless, which held an honored position on a table in the center of the room. The volume of traffic surprised him, though a portion of it was certainly dross, designed to mislead the Germans as to the actual level of underground activity. Finally, ten days after he'd landed in the field, the words crackled from the radio:
Limelight, la théâtre est fermé
. His activation signal. He told Gilbert he would be away for a time, and the man offered to accompany him. “Now that you are here,” he said, “it is all different. Nothing against the young ones, they are the patriots of Cambras, but I am a patriot of
France
, a veteran of the war. The
schleuhs
gassed me at Verdun.” Eidenbaugh thought about the offer for a moment—by the rules, he was supposed to go alone—but there was something of a test in Gilbert's manner, and he decided to trust the man. “Unless you are monumentally stupid or terribly unlucky,” the briefers had told him, “the Germans won't catch you. On the other hand, the chances of being betrayed, for any number of reasons, political or otherwise, are better than one would like.”

But he had to trust somebody, so he trusted Gilbert.

The train ride from Épinal to Belfort was nasty—cold and sweaty at once—and he vowed not to do it again. In the aisle was a great press of bodies, including German soldiers and airmen, making for two hours of sour breath, wet wool, a baby that wouldn't shut up, vacant faces, tired eyes, and icy drafts that blew through spaces between the boards of the ancient
wagon-lit
. Vintage 1914, he thought. A good deal of French rolling stock had traveled east to Germany—to be refitted for the different gauge—then sent on to Wehrmacht units near Moscow, there to vanish forever.

It took them two hours to travel forty-two miles, over oft-damaged and repaired track, shunted aside for flatcars carrying artillery pieces to the Atlantic coast, unable to attain much speed because of coal adulterated by sand and gravel. Gilbert, however, turned out to be a traveling companion of great comfort, prattling away the whole time about the health of his pigs and the price of cheese and “Lucien's” mother—supposedly Gilbert's sister—and every sort of mindless gossip that made for soothing cover and got the journey over with as quickly as possible. For his part, Eidenbaugh grunted and nodded, went along with the game, and acted as though he were pretending to listen to his boring uncle.

At both the Épinal and Belfort stations—especially the latter, which was close to Switzerland and thus a magnet for just about anything in occupied Europe that wasn't nailed down—
la geste
was much in evidence, pointedly in the business of
watching
. To Eidenbaugh they had the feel of provincial police inspectors, stocky and middle-aged, clumsy looking in their high-belted leather coats, and very stolid. Their eyes never stopped searching, a stare beyond rudeness that picked your life apart from subtle clues almost absurdly evident to their experienced gaze. Clearly a game but, just as clearly, a game they were good at. It scared Eidenbaugh so badly that a muscle ticked inside his cheek. When they saw something—what?—one of them would snap his fingers and beckon the individual over for a document check, holding the paper up to the white sky above the station platform. Gilbert, bless his heart, faltered not a whit, blabbering him past
la geste
and the usual police checkpoints with the story of his
maman
insisting that the roof be retiled, just at planting time, not a seed in the ground, and rain coming. But, Gilbert shrugged, one must obey the
maman
. What else could one do?

It was not the usual Gilbert who went to Belfort. The usual Gilbert sported a permanent gray stubble of whisker beneath a beat-up old beret, layers of shapeless sweaters, baggy wool pants, and rubber boots well mucked from the farmyard. The Belfort Gilbert, understanding without being told that he was to be no part of the business there, had shaven himself raw and produced a Sunday suit that wore its age proudly. In the street outside the station, he bade Eidenbaugh farewell and went off whistling, with a light step. Clearly, his mission in Belfort was a romantic one.