A Troubled Peace

by L. M. Elliott

  But maybe that was easier said than done here, where people had been tormented daily, starved, and set upon one another by the Nazis like in a cockfight—neighbors denouncing one another for revenge, for bread, to save their own skin, to be rid of people they thought troublesome or annoying or racially inferior. Given the suspicions, the residual and justified anger still smoldering in France, it would take real courage to stand up to a mob bent on revenge. Henry could see that their hatred would easily turn on anyone disagreeing or arguing against them.

  At Valence, the turbaned girl jumped to the ground before the train pulled to a complete stop. She hurried through the station. Henry was glad to see her slip away safely. No one noticed her because there was a huge commotion along the tracks. People had surrounded a horse-drawn grocery wagon. They were waving sticks, brooms, umbrellas, and shouting.

  “Du beurre!” a man from the crowd called into the train. The cart had butter in it. The food ministry had ordered it shipped to Paris, to be sold there. The mob was trying to stop it. “C’est notre beurre! Venez! Aidez-nous!”

  The man’s cries sparked a small riot. Henry was knocked about by passengers shouting and pushing to the exit. They rushed to the butter cart, shrieking at the driver to sell the butter to them, rather than loading it onto the train for Paris.

  “Moi!” They shoved and elbowed one another to be first. “Moi d’abord!” There was a madness among the people, a desperation that sickened Henry.

  For butter.

  He waded through the crowd and hurried to the edge of the train station to get his bearings. Far in the distance, on the eastern horizon, rose a long jagged shadow, the purple-gray outline of the Vercors’s mountains and the pre-Alps behind them. Henry caught his breath with relief. Toward the hills, there would be space. Toward the hills, he would be free of the smells, the panic bred by hungry people crammed too close together, squabbling over the same scrap of food.

  Henry had faith in the countryside, faith in good land providing hope and sustenance, faith that a people fed would be more merciful to one another, faith that in the hills that kissed the clouds, he would find Pierre.

  Henry shouldered his bag and walked away from the chaos the war had left in its wake.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Marchez!”

  Henry remembered the first night—a year and a treacherous journey ago—that the maquis set him along its ratline. No instructions other than turn left at a fork. Walk. Someone would pick him up. Who? Where? How will I know him?

  Walk. That was all the gruff maquis fighter would answer.

  Henry had walked through the night, his only companions moonlight and fear. He’d threaded his way along a two-foot-slim path of stones scratched into the white cliffs, so high they felt more part of the sky than of the earth. One false step and he’d have plummeted hundreds of feet, the only thing to catch him a forest of firs a parachute drop below.

  Walk.

  He’d made it down the crags into a valley of meadows, and crept through a slumbering village, barely breathing for fear of waking a dog that would howl an alarm. He had jumped back in terror from a poster of a German soldier, his nerves so raw he mistook the image for a person. Continuing, he made it out the other end and along the road some more. Finally, finally, as dawn broke and his confidence broke, a small figure had walked up the road, taken his hand, and led him to a safe house. Pierre—all of eight years old but with the courage of a medal-valor soldier.

  Walk.

  This would be easy. It was daylight for one thing, and the twenty miles it must be to the base of the mountain range were flat and beautiful. Stretching out around him were miles of chest-high sunflowers. Their faces were just beginning to stretch skyward and to open, bursts of gold, as if the sun had sprinkled bits of itself to the earth. He felt the distress of Marseille, the train ride, and the food riot slide off him.

  No sweat. I’ll walk. My pleasure.

  Henry set a steady pace. Back home he’d made the two miles to school in forty minutes, so he should make the mountains in about seven hours. He tried not to rush with impatience, knowing that would tire and ultimately slow him. He’d have to camp out that night. But by tomorrow he’d be in Vassieux, Pierre’s village. Tomorrow, he’d know.

  Henry let the land seduce him, glancing around, not warily as in the previous year—searching shadows, trees, rocks for Nazis—but with a tourist’s sense of awe. Virginia was gorgeous when it greened up in spring, but the colors here were so much more vibrant. The gold-green carpet of sunflowers reminded Henry of one of the paintings Madame Gaulloise had hanging in her aristocratic home. It’d been a landscape of illusion: from afar, a wash of colors, like dappled sunlight on water, revealing ponds, flowers, trees, clouds. Up close the picture spread itself into a blur of thick dots and smears of paint. Impressionism, she’d called the style of painting.

  Madame. Henry couldn’t let his mind wander there. There was another incredibly brave person he had endangered. He didn’t see how her quick-witted playacting could possibly have saved her from the Gestapo once they had her. The only solace there was that she had made the decision to be a freedom-fighter for herself, as an adult. Could an eight-year-old boy really understand what he risked, what he was facing if caught?

  Henry shook his head to shake out the thoughts. He didn’t want to mourn right now. He wanted to hope, hope that just on the other side of the mountain he would find Pierre, safe, and therefore find himself. Then he could go home, whole, home to Patsy, ready. Henry forced himself to whistle a happy tune—his carefree loudness another luxury of liberation.

  Three hours of warm sun and watching small birds flitting among the flowers to hunt bugs brought Henry to Chabeuil. He decided to skirt the town’s edges. Not much longer to go now. The mountains were rearing huge ahead, three thousand feet of ragged rock, like the sawtooth walls of a castle-fort, guarding the entrance to heaven.

  From inside the town, he heard playful shouts of children and a ball bouncing against a wall. He smelled wood fires and meat being smoked. He saw small, square gardens, neatly lined with sprouts of lettuce and bean plants. Life was beginning anew here. He felt like skipping.

  But on the mountain end of the town, Henry pulled up short. Ahead of him were balls of tangled barbed wire, the fence posts long gone for firewood. Huge, thick ruts furrowed the ground, stretching for miles toward the Vercors. Henry knew what had cut so deeply into the earth—tanks. But what horrified him was the sight of a long strip of paving and the scattershot debris of planes along its edges. The hulls had been burned, the engines ripped open for parts, the gun racks stripped, but Henry could still recognize the outline. Nazi Junkers.

  He looked up at the mountains, thinking air speed. Sweet Jesus. It would have taken only five minutes for those Luftwaffe planes to cross over into…

  Henry started to run—run along the flight path he knew could deliver a fiery death to Pierre’s people within minutes of takeoff.

  Of course, he couldn’t run far. The road soon turned into a hard upward slope. His legs slowed to a walk, an aching scramble, as he leaned forward for balance. With dread he noticed a deserted Mercedes-Benz, pockmarked with bullet holes; an overturned truck, gutted; emptied strings of machine gun cartridges; a little further, crushed cans of gasoline and long, ragged scorch marks scarring the land. Idiot! What did you expect?

  Henry climbed up into winds and looked back to a world laid out in a serene patchwork of lavenders, golds, and greens. The sun was setting low, beneath him. Where he stood clouds were gathering around him, wet, cold. He felt none of the joy he usually would when wisps of cumulus brushed his hands. He was in for it in terms of weather. By the time he made it to the crest, it was raining, water streaming down the road. He recognized the pass, Col de la Bataille, and found its tunnel through the rock. Huddled inside, he watched lightning crackle along the plain. He couldn’t yet see into the mountain valley on the other side, the green pocket where Pierre’s farm lay. His view was blo
cked by a thick forest—the woods where he and Pierre had met up with the local maquis, hurrying to retrieve guns and chocolates parachuted in by the British.

  Henry’s worries thundered in his head. Would the priest, the monks, have been able to shelter Pierre during a Nazi air raid? Surely the Nazis wouldn’t have gone after everyone, not women, not children. Chabeuil looked intact. He paused in his thinking, remembering the brutal raid on Pierre’s home and how the Milice had gunned down the ancient grandfather without asking him a single question.

  Henry made himself watch the storm. After months of agonized speculation, he’d gotten within a few hours of discovering the truth of Pierre’s circumstances. Henry had at least learned one thing while on the run—to hunker down and wait things out when he had no other options.

  He sat down with the rock at his back, glancing back and forth between the two tunnel entrances, instinctively checking his camp perimeters, as they’d been taught in basic training. Such habits were dying hard. Henry pulled out a can of Spam, twisted the key along its top to roll back the tin, and forced himself to swallow.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Seven white crosses.

  They were the first things Henry saw as he came out of the cool, sweet-smelling beech-wood shadows of Forêt de Lente. The bright sunrise cast a crimson glow on the roadside graves. He rounded the bend in the gravel path. Five more wooden crosses—the dead obviously laid to rest where they had fallen. There, another ten. And just beyond, a farmhouse charred, nothing but a rectangle of sooty stone.

  Henry filled with dread.

  After ten more minutes of scrambling down slopes, Henry came to the rim of the Vassieux valley. Beneath him should have been a lush green cup of fields and farms, wildflowers and sleepy cattle, ruled in the center by a little village of creamy houses with cheery pink-tiled roofs that were nestled around a church—its bell ringing out the hour, clear and sweet, rejoicing in another day.

  Instead there was silence. A wide field of white crosses. A thin dirt runway, pockmarked with bomb craters. Skeletons of small aircraft that looked like German gliders.

  And where the village should have been—alive with roosters crowing, children yawning over cups of frothy warm milk, mothers humming as they poached eggs—was rubble.

  Oh, no. No, no, no. Henry shaded his eyes against the horizontal sunlight, and scanned up the valley to where he knew Pierre’s cluster of farm buildings should be. Please. Let it be there.

  Gone. Everything gone. As if God, large as the mountains, had stood on that ridge and rolled boulders down into the valley, smashing and crushing things the way a bowling ball would glass. And yet the revolting truth was that it had been men, methodically moving from house to house, bent on the destruction of other human beings. Henry could imagine the cries, the pleas, the refusals, the machine-gun fire, flames catching hold of timber, houses collapsing.

  He crouched, hugging his knees to fight off vomiting. What should he do now? Who was left to help him find Pierre? Was Pierre alive to be found?

  From the distance came the faint sound of gears shifting and grinding, an engine backfiring from a charcoal converter. Henry lifted his head. A small silver square of car was threading its way into the broken remains of Vassieux from the opposite side of the valley.

  Henry stood. Perhaps the driver would know something that could help him. He descended into the ruins.

  Henry found the car parked alongside the field of crosses. A man had gotten out to stand among the graves. He was short, square, and solid like a bulldog, with gray hair and a thick black moustache. He held his brimmed beret in one hand, a crooked walking stick in the other. His hefty mountain boots, woolen pants, sweater-vest, and flannel shirt rolled up bare, muscular arms showed him to be a Vercors man. Henry felt a twinge of hope. This man had survived the German attack. That meant others must have, too. He trotted up shouting, not noticing that the man’s face was awash in tears.

  So startled, the man’s sorrow switched instantly to suspicion. “Qui êtes-vous?” he snapped. “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?”

  Henry faltered at the man’s belligerence. In stammering French, he explained he was looking for a boy.

  The man’s frown turned murderous. “You are American?” he growled.

  “Yes, monsieur.” Henry was thrilled—the man spoke English. Hopefully he would have the same reverence for FDR and be as helpful as the café owner. “I’m trying to find a boy, a boy who lived on a farm”—he turned away to point up the road—“about a mile up, near…”

  Henry didn’t see the hit coming. The first blow knocked him to the ground. The second strike of the walking stick split open the gash Lilly had sewn shut. The third exploded pain in his ribs. The fourth, he caught.

  Holding fast to the stick, Henry yanked the man down and jumped to his feet. But the Frenchman lunged at Henry’s knees, tackling him back to the dirt. Choking on dust, Henry wrestled the writhing man, trying to push him off. The man was strong. He kicked, punched, all the while snarling, “Why you not come? Why you not come?”

  Taking everything he had to roll the man over and off, Henry shoved and back-crawled. He staggered to his feet and held up his fists, just the way Clayton had taught him to box. “Come on. Now I’m ready for you.”

  But he wasn’t. The man was far faster than Henry anticipated. With a rush and a shoulder to Henry’s gut, the Frenchman knocked him to his knees again. Henry cried out in pain, feeling a horrible catch in his breath.

  “Arrêtez! Arrêtez, patron! Nous avons eu assez de carnage!”

  His head spinning, vision blurred, Henry collapsed. Lying on the ground, he could make out another pair of feet running toward him, kicking up chalky ash. Soft hands sat him up and, for a moment, Henry could focus on the babyish, pale face and the concerned voice of a second man who knelt beside him. “Pouvez-vous vous lever?”

  Could Henry stand? He tried and failed.

  Instead he felt himself pulled to his feet and walked to the shade of a burned-out house and lowered to lean against the wall. There was something familiar about this second man’s face. Something. But all Henry could focus on was the incomprehensible argument going on above him between the baby-faced man and Henry’s attacker.

  “C’est un d’eux! Ils ont permis le massacre de nos gens!”

  “Cet homme n’est pas responsable de ça, patron.”

  “Quelqu’un doit payer!”

  Bloodied, shaken, confused, Henry could only understand the words massacre and someone having to pay for it. The memory of the Gestapo beating him unconscious gripped his mind and twisted the moment into a mess of past, present, and fearful imagination.

  “Hit him. Schlag ihn! Again! Schlag ihn nochmal! Hard!…You cannot win this game, American. Schlag ihn hart!…See that over there? We call that the bathtub. Your head goes in the water—over and over and over again—however long it takes for me to get the information I want. But first…hit him again—hard. Nochmal! Härter!”

  No, it’s not real. Henry fought against the daytime nightmare. He focused on the words flying around him. French words. French. “It’s not the Gestapo. It’s not the Gestapo. It’s not the Gestapo,” he muttered louder and louder, chanting to stop his slide into the insanity of memory and paranoia.

  The French conversation stopped.

  “Mon Dieu.” The Vercors man’s face came into view. “What have I done?” Henry felt hands gently passing over his rib cage. “I may break a rib. I drive you to doctor. Aidez-moi à le soulever.”

  Henry felt himself carried and laid in the back of the car. Wind rushed over his face as the car took off. Each bounce and jolt along the rough road felt like another blow to his ribs. Henry kept his eyes on the sky, lifting his spirit to the clouds just as he had the day he was taken out to be shot.

  “It’s not the Gestapo. It’s not the Gestapo. It’s not the Gestapo.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “You must forgive le patron. Since July, his grief haunts him.”

 
; Henry sat in a tiny, incense-scented church, one of the few buildings standing in the nearby town of Saint Martin. A doctor was circling bandages tightly around his chest, setting his ribs in case one had cracked. The Vercors man and the pale-faced one were sitting outside the door, under a tree charred along one side and blooming on the other.

  The doctor continued, “He says that when he heard you call out against the Gestapo, he realized his madness.”

  Henry shifted uncomfortably, ashamed of his outburst. How crazy was he going to get? “About that, doctor, I can explain….” Henry trailed off. How could he explain?

  “No need. Those of us who survived Nazi brutality are all a little mad. Le patron was a sergeant in the Great War, a union leader, like a father. That is why we called him le patron, boss. As leader of our maquis, he feels responsible for all the deaths, the burning. That is why his rage overcomes him sometimes. Vous comprenez?”

  Henry nodded. He certainly understood sorrows causing wild actions. “But why is he so angry at Americans?”

  “Because he agreed to ‘Operation Montagnards.’ He knew how the plan endangered us. How terrible Nazi reprisals would be if it failed. But he trusted General de Gaulle and the Allies.”

  “Operation Montagnards?” All battle plans seemed to have had code titles. “Does montagnard mean mountain?”

  The doctor sighed with a weariness so deep Henry knew he’d never forget the sound of it. “Yes. The plan was that when the Allies attacked the Normandy beaches on D-day, our maquis would establish a mountain fortress here, cut supply lines from Germany, and attack the Nazis from the rear. We would make a vise—we the eastern side, the D-day army the western side—to crush them.”