by Mark Helprin
The gentlest cross between a whistle and a hum, an insistent breeze through the silks made the familiar sound of tracking steadily to the ground. Alone in the sky, Harry surveyed the world as winds aloft moved the clouds across a lustrous moon that lit the landscape in silver. On the eastern horizon toward Paris, the sky was filled almost warmly with beckoning stars.
Then he sensed the ground quickly rising as the stars themselves appeared to shoot upward and the world below grow uneven. The tension of the leg-bag lines disappeared as the bags came to rest and tilted over. He braced, hit, relaxed, and rolled. He was in France. He had landed perilously close to a stone wall and tumbled over an exposed flat rock that he struck in such a way as to have pulled a muscle or tendon in his neck.
Fired by adrenaline, he raced through the things he had to do. With light wind and no need to control his chute, he readied the carbine to fire. Parachute lines trailing from him like a spider web, he stood, listened, and slowly turned. His eyes were used to the moonlit darkness, which seemed almost like daylight, and he saw nothing but the outline of trees, stone walls, and a small building in the next field. It was too late for frogs and crickets, and too early for engines, talk, footfalls, music, or the metallic sounds made by soldiers as they move—their equipment striking rocks and branches; rifles vaguely clinking; buckles and water bottles, willed to be quiet, rebelling. Not even any lowing or mooing. Nothing.
He took off his parachute harness and other attachments, gathered the cloth, unfolded his shovel, and began to dig, not daring to breathe hard, touching the tip of the spade to the earth each time before pushing it in, so as not to make the sharp sound of steel against stone. Every few shovelfuls, he would stop to listen. The soil was rich and not hard to pierce or lift. Seemingly without effort—though now he would not have felt strain had he been making a hole five times as deep—he finished after a few minutes, gathered the moon-white silk, and buried it, being careful to replace sod and turf so that at a glance it would seem undisturbed. Having buried the leg bags too, he distributed the contents into his pack and pouches and onto his straps and belts. His immediate undertaking was to find cover, the next to rid himself of excess weight. If possible, he would use the bazooka and its two rockets as soon as he could, which would subtract twenty-one pounds and, because the launcher was broken down into two sections, four awkward weights to carry. Once the rockets were fired he would be free to fight as he did best, light and from cover, with precise shots. But he would not, as the pilots said, drop his ordnance over water so as to get to this: putting the rockets on target would save lives.
By the radium hands and blazes on his watch face it was four in the morning. Somewhere west and south of St. Lô, he moved off toward the silhouette of the building beyond the stone wall he had missed on landing. It was not likely that there would be Germans anywhere about, or anyone at all, but soon the farmers would arise.
The building was an old, well kept, windowless barn with a double door. He waited, listening, and then went in. He might have used a flashlight, but he had chosen not to carry one, for without its weight and that of extra batteries he could carry almost fifty additional .30-caliber rounds. The carbine was the thing, the anchor of his world.
He took a stubby candle from his pocket, held it low to the ground, lit it, and, shielding it with his body, stepped inside, closing the door behind him. The only thing there was hay. He cleared a space on the floor, put the candle down, and as quickly as he could, because even the faintest flash of light might pass the cracks in the boards and give him away, took stock and rearranged. In his pack or strapped to it were rations for ten days, a ground sheet, a light woolen blanket the size of a throw, four hundred rounds of ammunition, a folding shovel, and two rockets that protruded on each side like horns. In his pouches and pockets were four thirty-round magazines, two grenades, two half-pound blocks of plastique, toilet articles, pressure bandages, candles, matches, sulfa powder, morphine, two signal flares, a mirror, a clicker, maps, and a monocular. On his belt were a canteen, a wire cutter, and a bayonet; hanging from him on their shoulder straps were the two parts of the bazooka. In his hands was the carbine, loaded with a magazine. And on his head was the helmet he detested for its horrible weight, heat, and the way it threw off every move and restricted both sight and sound, but was better than a bullet in the brain.
He could not know until morning even approximately where he was; he was not at all hungry or thirsty; he had landed safely and undetected; and although his heart had been pounding, it was now settled down. He blew out the candle, put it in his pocket, and backed into the hay, partly hidden from the door. Placing the pack and the bazooka to his right, he took out the blanket and threw it about his shoulders, loosened his collar, removed the helmet, and, the carbine in his hands, leaned back. All was quiet. His neck, he now realized, hurt rather badly. But that was nothing. He listened. Then he took the chance a lone soldier must always take, and slept.
Awakening a little after the light, he went to the walls of the barn and peered out the cracks on all four sides. He could see the spire of a church fairly close to the south. To east and west lay fields crisscrossed by stone walls, and to the north were palisades of evergreens. He had breakfast, brushed his teeth, took a drink of water, and buried the ration containers, all in about a minute. Then he shouldered his load and started toward the forest, where he intended to establish a base before determining his exact position and setting about his job.
As soon as he got close enough to the wall he had crossed the night before, he caught sight of a farmer using a long switch to drive cows down the hill. Harry started toward him and remained unobserved until he was about seventy-five feet away. The farmer started, drew in a breath, said something, and threw back his arms.
Here would come a test more frightening than engaging the enemy—speaking French correctly after many years in which it had been fallow. When he was much younger it had taken him weeks in Paris before he had felt vaguely comfortable, and here, despite the fact that he had studied, he was absolutely fresh and with other things on his mind.
“The Americans! You are American!” the farmer said, followed by four years of pent-up emotion expressed in a western French dialect and agricultural idiom that Harry would not have been able to translate even with a dictionary, and to which Harry answered only “Yes, yes,” and, to his surprise, because it sounded like something straight from the music hall, “Here we are again.”
“Thank God!” the farmer exclaimed, stepping back and again holding out his arms. He had a mustache, a cap, and was old enough to be Harry’s father. “Let me bring you some cheese! Some bread!” There he stopped, and looked about. “Where are the others?”
“Just me,” said Harry, and then, seeing a look almost of terror on the man’s face, adding, “in this sector. The others,” he told him, “are in the north.”
“How many?” The farmer was horrified at the prospect of invasion one soldier at a time.
“I don’t know exactly,” Harry said, carefully formulating his French and, he thought, doing rather well in regard to accent, “but a few hundred thousand in the first cut,” he assured him, using the French idiom, “and, soon thereafter, two or three million.”
“Two or three million?” the farmer asked, his eyes, above reddened cheeks, like moons seen from the soil of Mars.
“Yes,” Harry answered proudly, “million.”
Not knowing how to react to such greatness of scale, the farmer returned to what he knew. “Let me get you some bread, some cheese.”
“I don’t have time,” said Harry. “I need information. I have questions.”
“My house is right over there. It’s safer. Sometimes the Germans pass by on their motorcycles, but they can’t see the house from the road.”
“What kind of cheese? I can’t carry a soft cheese.” Harry marveled at this turn. It was as if he were in a grocery store on Lexington Avenue.
“No, very hard, like Gruyère.”
> “Okay.”
The farmer’s wife was much less emotional, or at least she did not show it, channeling everything she might have felt into the intense provision of a breakfast that Harry ate, marking it down as lunch in advance. He spread his map on the table and then availed himself of intelligence to perfection, for the farmer had lived in this house all his life and knew everything about anything within three days’ walk.
The night before, Harry had not imagined that he would be filling himself with an omelette aux fines herbes, bacon, bread, and butter. They pressed upon him two loaves and a kilo of cheese, which he stowed in his pack, the breads symmetrically next to the rockets, which they resembled. Then they got down to business.
Beautiful and detailed, the pre-war map was printed in red, yellow, blue, and green, and was unlike a military map except that now marked clearly, and as a result of reports from the resistance and the latest photo reconnaissance prior to June 4, were German echelons, their numbers, equipment, and the dates when last observed. War was overlaid upon peace in a rough and smudgy black. Like someone who knew he was a part of something great, even if only a small part, the farmer looked at the map as though looking into the face of Joan of Arc. This portrait of France now before him in the hands of a soldier who was about to fight for it, he found so exciting as to make him euphoric. He moved his index finger happily south and west of St. Lô, descending as if by magic to the exact spot where they were.
“Here,” he said, “Soulles. We are between the village and the Bois de Soulles.”
Harry saw that he could go east to lay an ambush on the main road to St. Lô, or north and west to where the railroad crossed a river, the Terrette, on a bridge that might still be intact. “Where are the Germans?” he asked. The farmer pointed to sections far south or on the coast. “When they come through here,” Harry asked, “how do they travel?”
“Just a few, on motorcycles and sometimes in trucks. We’re out of the way.”
“I mean when they travel en masse, with tanks and big guns.”
“Not on the road. The road is too narrow and it twists. They put the tanks and guns on flatcars.”
Harry pointed to the intersection of the Terrette and the rail line to St. Lô. “Do you know this bridge?”
“I know it.”
“Is it intact?”
“Yes.”
“What’s there?”
“Two anti-aircraft guns near the road, and some soldiers who guard either end of it.”
“How many?”
“Three or four, maybe ten.”
“What color are their uniforms?”
“Black.”
“SS? Why would the SS be guarding a bridge?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s important to them.”
“Do you remember what weapons they have? Do they have machine guns in emplacements? Is there a pillbox?”
“I don’t know what weapons. When we drive we can’t stop or stare for too long. There is no pillbox. You can get there without going on the roads if you go straight north through the bois. You’ll reach a river. Follow that north, which will lead you to Quibou, only about two and a half kilometers. The road west of Quibou leads north about a kilometer to the railway, and the bridge is about a kilometer west of that. You would have to go on the roads a little. Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Everything is dangerous.”
“The Germans,” the farmer said, as if this were a new idea, “must not be allowed to win.”
“We think so, too,” Harry said. He thought he should elaborate, despite his unpracticed French. “France will be liberated and Germany will be defeated all the way to Berlin. We’ve decided upon that. We’ve decided that it might be the last thing a lot of us do. I’m content with it. I have my task, my life is full.” He stopped, and then said, “Against all reason, I’m happy.” Changing the subject, he asked, “Have you ever seen the Germans in the bois?”
“Never. All they do is pass on the roads now and then, just a few, on their way to somewhere else and going very fast.”
“Are there collaborators here?”
“Here? No. There isn’t anyone to collaborate with.”
“Resistance?”
“In St. Lô.”
“I like the river,” Harry told him, looking at the lovely blue line on the map. “I like the river very much.”
“Why?”
“Dogs can’t track you, and when you’re forced into it, you come out clean.”
With thinning patches of morning fog still gliding across the fields, Harry put pastures and walls behind him and disappeared among the tall pines of the Bois de Soulles, stopping every few minutes to look and listen. The preservation of forests in such ancient and intensively worked landscapes was no more explicable than the existence of villages untouched by war; or women so beautiful and radiant of the spirit that perfected imperfect form as to appear like angels floating above the things of the world; or soldiers who come through every kind of fire without being hit. He never prayed for such protection, thinking it would be to presume too much. But at times he felt it, an all-embracing beauty that knit everything together, and made sense even of death.
Deep in the forest, he went in directions opposite to those in which his senses guided him, rejecting the open and easy way in favor of the blocked and the difficult. Contradicting the contours of the land and ignoring the natural paths through it, he found himself in a hidden, cathedral-like clearing in which seven pines—he counted—rose straight and high into the blue, but were surrounded by a perimeter of dense brush woven with fallen boughs almost into breastworks. Because it was so much out of the way he doubted that anyone had been there in decades. Certainly all over the world were patches of ground, even in populous areas, where no one had ever or would ever set foot, and until he had arrived this could have been one of them. Unshouldering his load, he felt the illusion of rising. Then he sat down on a floor of dry pine needles and leaned against one of the trees, the carbine cradled in his lap.
The back of his jacket, pressed against the tree, was immediately spotted with heavy imprints of resin. He didn’t mind. As dirt and dust adhered to it, it would soon turn from clear to black, but would not lose its scent until perhaps the end of the war, and it was a scent he loved. He tilted his head up and stared through the branches at the sky. The rich green and blue at this moment were all he wanted from the world, and the world provided.
That night he would leave his stores in the clearing, take weapons, explosives, and provisions for three days, and establish himself near the railroad bridge to wait for a train rushing the 17th SS toward St. Lô. He knew neither when nor if such a train would pass over the bridge, or if the terrain would afford him a position in which he could wait and from which he could shoot, fight, and safely withdraw. But having come this far with all going well, he was confident that he would find a target.
There was a pacing to things, not least in war, a rhythm of stops and starts as if preordained. He had followed this path in Sicily, and now he could almost hear the commands: go, stop, go fast, go slow. When they ran together, as often they did, they seemed to coalesce into music. His sense was that in following it he could stay alive and that in departing from it he might not.
By nightfall he was so well rested and alone that he wondered if he were still in the army and at war. Then he moved off to the north, carefully noting how to get back. Soon he found the river. Although in places there was a path, following it was difficult, but when he exited the forest he was able to move more rapidly through the fields. Coming to a road, he crossed in the open rather than mucking around in the river under the bridge. The countryside was so deserted that he might have sung at the top of his voice without an audience other than cows and sheep.
At around midnight, as the river arced gently northwest it brought him to the junction of two roads just south of Quibou. There he saw what he assumed were Germans, although because they were in a speeding truck he wasn’t sure. The t
raffic was not even desultory. Five minutes after the truck came two bicycles. These, he was fairly sure, were civilians, for when they passed he had seen no gun barrels silhouetted against the sky.
This road was a lot busier than the first, so he had to weigh darting over it versus going into the water, which would be uncomfortable and possibly fatal, in that the bazooka’s rockets were electrically fused and to wet their firing mechanisms might mean both failure and death. Nor did he want to immerse either his ammunition or his grenades. He waited for five or ten minutes, during which no one passed, and decided to chance going over the road. After crawling up the bank, he stared into the distance first one way and then another. The moon had yet to rise, and he lay there, listening.
Deciding on impulse to go, he bounded up and ran across the road as fast as he could. Only halfway, and unable to check his forward momentum, not least because of all the dead weight he carried, he saw what appeared to be a complication of the darkness. The instant before he collided with this apparition, it was lit in orange as a lighter was brought to a cigarette. Though unable to modify his trajectory, he registered, in shock, two helmetless German soldiers standing astride their bicycles, about to share a light. They had pistols but not rifles, and their heads were close to the flame as they focused upon lighting up.
They were less aware of Harry than he was of them, and, because of their proximity to the flame, blinded. Harry had no time even to think “Oh no,” much less to say anything or alter his course. So, before he hit, he gave an extra push. Then he made contact, like a crashing locomotive.
He knocked the wind out of both of them and sent them flying at least five feet before they fell to the ground in a clatter of bicycles, one of which sounded its bell as it scraped along the pavement. They could not have had the faintest idea of what had hit them, and before they began to get up Harry was three hundred feet away, heart pounding, running under his combat load across a rocky field in the dark. The dumbfounded Germans didn’t know from which direction it had come, much less where it went or what it was.
