The Resistance

by Peter Steiner

  The Germans were completely taken by surprise. Our liberation is inevitable. Yes, the Allies’ advance will be difficult. Yes, they have met with stiff resistance. But they are gaining momentum as the armies of the “invincible” Third Reich fall before them.

  There is wonderful news from the village of Sainte-Mère-Église: The French flag flies over the town hall once again. The citizens of Sainte-Mère-Église are free. The Tricolor flies in Carentan also, where the citizens have met the liberating troops with choruses of “La Marseillaise.”

  The city of Caen is surrounded by Allied forces, and it too will soon be free, and other cities and towns will follow. The entire Nazi army along with their French lapdog collaborators can do nothing to stop the Allies’ relentless advance. The thousand-year Reich is finished.

  A great deal of fighting remains to be done, a lot of blood remains to be shed. How slowly or how quickly the enemy is defeated, how soon our own Saint-Léon is free—that is up to us. You can hide in your kitchens and wait for the end. Or you can join the effort to finally defeat Nazi tyranny and oppression. Help our liberators. Feed them, take them in, hide them, give them what help you can. Defeat and resist the Germans at every turn, in every way. And defeat the French collaborators when and where you meet them. They have brought suffering upon us. Whatever humiliation they may suffer, they have brought upon themselves. Resist, resist, resist!

  Vive la Libération!!!! Vive la France!!!!

  Colonel Hollinger received urgent requests from the front in Normandy for ammunition and supplies. But the recent attacks had severely reduced his stockpiles and crippled his ability to move them forward. Many railroads and highways had been attacked and were now impassable. Military convoys were now being routinely attacked by armed partisans. Not that that mattered, as far as Colonel Hollinger was concerned. His motor pool had been sabotaged, and most of his vehicles were now useless. Worse than useless, since they could easily be attacked and destroyed.

  “Useless?” said General von Wuthenow on the telephone from Tours. “Please, Colonel…”

  “I do not exaggerate, Herr General. The sabotage was complete.”

  “But, Colonel,” said the general, “tell me. How is that even possible?”

  “It is not possible, Herr General. And yet it happened.”

  There had been a heavy guard, and yet saboteurs had managed to damage every single vehicle. In fact, the colonel could not be certain that his own soldiers were not involved. After all, if there were no trucks, there would be no dangerous convoys. In any case, it looked now as though it would be some time before any supplies would be leaving Saint-Léon. Colonel Hollinger did not have enough mechanics to even begin making all the necessary repairs.

  “Then draft local mechanics,” said the general. “Do you have local mechanics? You must have local mechanics.” Claude Melun was enlisted to oversee the repair effort. Claude spoke a little German. And Colonel Hollinger had used him in some limited capacity before.

  When the colonel showed up at the motor pool to see how the work was progressing, Claude Melun asked to speak with him. “You have a bigger problem than you think, Colonel,” said Claude, wiping grease from his hands. “Let me show you.” He climbed onto the bumper of a truck and pointed into the engine compartment.

  “I am not a mechanic,” said the colonel.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Claude. “Look.” The colonel was obliged to climb up beside Claude. “Look there. See? This vehicle was sabotaged by plugging the gas line to the carburetor. That’s a crude trick, and a quick and easy repair to make.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is down here,” said Claude, pointing lower in the engine compartment.

  “I don’t see anything,” said the colonel.

  “I almost didn’t either. But you see that cable? See, right there, where it’s shiny? It’s been cut. Not all the way through. But just enough so that somewhere out on the road it will break and the brakes will fail.”

  “And the vehicle will be useless and, worse, helpless,” said the colonel, finishing Claude’s thought.

  “Exactly,” said Claude. “Now, the vehicle next to it doesn’t have that particular problem. But after looking it over for a while, I found it has a pinhole in the gas line. That one will give out somewhere out on the road too, just like the first one, also with possibly disastrous consequences. A snapped brake line could lead to an accident; a punctured gas line could too.”

  “How many are there like this?” said Colonel Hollinger.

  “There’s no way to know without doing a thorough inspection of every truck. How many do you have?”

  “A hundred and ten,” said Colonel Hollinger.

  “You’re talking about many days. At least,” said Claude. “Probably weeks. And even then we might not catch everything.”

  Colonel Hollinger stepped down from the bumper. He turned in a slow circle, regarding the entire fleet of useless trucks. “This is sophisticated work,” he said finally. “Who around here could do such a thing?”

  “Who?” said Claude. “Well, Colonel, pardon me for saying so, but your men could.”

  “Who else?” said the colonel.

  “Well, Colonel, we’re forty kilometers from Le Mans. The twenty-four-hour races used to happen there. Plus there’s the Renault factory. There are hundreds of men who could do such a thing. Maybe thousands.”

  “Well, Melun, you had better get started.”

  Colonel Hollinger returned to his office to consider his options. They were not many and not good. He summoned Lieutenant Ludwig and the captain in charge of the motor pool. “I can do the inspections and repairs on every vehicle and delay the resupply until the trucks are safe.…”

  “That is unacceptable, Colonel,” said Ludwig. “That would cost lives in Normandy. Why not send the trucks out with mechanics in each convoy?”

  “And where will all these mechanics come from?” said the motor pool captain.

  “From the French. The same men who are doing the inspections,” said Ludwig.

  “And the same men who did the sabotage,” said Hollinger.

  “If that is the case, then they are as dangerous here as they are on the road,” said Ludwig.

  “No, they’re not,” said the captain. “Here we can keep our eyes on them.”

  “Like you did the other night?”

  Hollinger called Tours. “Make the repairs,” said the general. “We’ve got other sources for now. But hurry.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Hollinger. And he had every intention of hurrying. If only his French mechanics had been faster. As it turned out, though, the first day they could only complete four trucks.

  “Four?!” said Hollinger. “That is unacceptable, Melun. Impossible.”

  “Colonel, you have to understand,” said Claude. “First of all, the possibilities for sabotage on a large, complicated vehicle are endless. We have to check every centimeter, and we don’t even know what we’re looking for. So far we’ve found a brake cable cut, a brake cylinder leaking, a gas line leak, and a damaged steering column. So far.”

  Claude did not name what was “second of all,” which was the fact that it was Claude Melun himself who had damaged the vehicles in the first place. Claude was not part of Simon’s network, nor of any other network, for that matter. Claude had finally just had enough. He had gotten sick and tired of Germans. Germans here, Germans there. Four years of Germans was enough.

  Claude already knew his way around the motor pool. He knew when there were more guards on duty and when there were fewer, where they patrolled, and when certain corners of the yard went unobserved. He had come under the fence one afternoon, while the guards were all at the front gate to change shifts, and had hidden in a truck until nightfall. Then he had gone from one truck to the other—the trucks were high enough off the ground so that he could work from underneath—doing quick and simple damage to as many of them as he could. He started in the middle of the yard, whe
re there were no guards, and worked outward. It took a minute or two to plug a gas line or cut a tire.

  He had only done the subtler damage—the pinhole and the partially cut cable—to two trucks, and he had only done it after the colonel had summoned him and brought him to the motor pool. Now he had all the time in the world to damage all the rest, even as he worked on repairing the damage he had just done.

  * * *

  A mixed force of British and Canadian parachutists was to make a landing fifteen kilometers north of Saint-Léon. It was to happen within the week. The signal would be the phrase The carrots are cooked. “Who dreams up these signals?” said Anne Marie.

  Simon laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Someone who does not like cooking, if I had to guess. But listen: This is an important operation,” he said. “And a big one.” Anne Marie—Florence, as he called her—and her colleagues would meet at midnight at the designated field. They would signal the planes and guide a full company of parachutists down with light signals. The parachutists would divide themselves into smaller units. Anne Marie and the others—two for each small group—would escort them to designated hiding places. “In your case and your partner’s, it’s Chêne Boppe, the giant oak in the Bercé Forest. Someone else will take them from there.”

  “That’s a full night’s walk,” she said.

  “That far?” said Simon. “I didn’t realize. Are you up to it?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Do you need a weapon?” he said. “Or ammunition?”

  “I have them,” she said.

  “Do you need anything else?” said Simon.

  “Don’t we all?” she said.

  Anne Marie had two radios at home. She listened to the one in her room, and the boys listened upstairs. She tried to keep them from knowing how involved she was. She was not so much worried about security as she was about Jean and Onesime. She knew they would be worried about her. And these days she also had to worry about Marie Livrist—called Marie Piano by the boys—who was in love with Onesime. And then there was Angeline’s Henri, although she didn’t know exactly how she ought to be worried about him. Since the day he had fled the OWS train, she did not know which side he was on.

  Four nights after Simon had made his rounds in Saint-Léon, the message came.

  The carrots are cooked. The carrots are cooked.

  All over Saint-Léon, people turned off their radios at the same time. They ate supper or drank a glass of wine or played checkers or did crosswords. They oiled and polished their weapons, they checked and rechecked their ammunition, the batteries in their flashlights. They smoked. No one would be leaving for a while yet, and they had to have something to do. They were like a professional army, except no one knew who would be standing next to him.

  Yves Renard took note of the carrot message. “Ah, there it is.” But he sat with his ear close to the radio and continued to listen. He listened night after night with a pencil in his hand, whether he expected a message or not. Once in a while, for some reason known only to himself, he would write down one of the phrases. By now he had a notebook whose pages were filled with the phrases he had written. They were in chronological order, and the date he heard them was noted in a column on the side of the page.

  The enchanted trout still eats her young. The enchanted trout still eats her young.

  Yves sat up straight in his chair. “Did you hear that?” he said.

  “What?” said Stephanie.

  “The enchanted trout still eats her young,” said Yves.

  “The enchanted trout?” she said.

  “… still eats her young.”

  “Does it mean something?” said Stephanie.

  “I don’t know,” said Yves. “But it’s strange, don’t you think?”

  “You mean because it’s about something here in Saint-Léon? The German bar?”

  “The messages don’t usually mean anything in that way. They don’t usually refer to anything like that. For instance, if it were a real message, and not just a decoy, then it could compromise security, give something away.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. A meeting place, or…”

  “Maybe it’s a coincidence,” said Stephanie.

  “Maybe.” Yves wrote the message in his notebook. He turned off the radio.

  Yves went into the bedroom and put on his boots. He and his partner, whoever that might be, would be walking all the way to the Chêne Boppe in the Bercé Forest. “I won’t be back until tomorrow,” he said, and leaned over to kiss Stephanie on the forehead.

  Stephanie looked at Yves. He was almost twenty-five now, but he still looked more like a boy than a policeman. His mustache was blond and wispy. And his eyes still had that look of eternal wonder that she had always loved. He started to turn, but she stood up quickly and wrapped him in her arms.

  Because Yves was frightened of expressions of affection—things could change so easily; love could disappear in an instant—Stephanie usually avoided declaring her feelings for him. And he did the same with her, as though their happiness were too, too fragile. In fact Yves had once made her promise not to declare her love for him. “I know that … how you feel about me, and you know how I feel,” he said. He was afraid saying it would jinx the whole thing. “Just tell me,” he said, “when you don’t love me anymore.”

  Now Stephanie clung to Yves. She did not know why. Perhaps it was the odd message about the enchanted trout.

  “Maybe there is another Enchanted Trout somewhere else in France,” she said.

  “Like you said,” said Yves. “It’s just a coincidence. It isn’t any stranger than cooked carrots. Or John has a long mustache. That was a message the other night. It means nothing.” But then suddenly Yves took Stephanie’s head between his hands and pulled her to him. He held here there so that his mouth was right beside her ear. Stephanie hugged him to her even tighter. Then he said in a voice that was so tiny that she almost missed it, “Yves loves Stephanie. Yves loves Stephanie.” Yves pulled himself from her arms, kissed her lightly on the forehead, and was gone.

  Yves rode his bicycle to town. It was late. The streets were empty. The lights were all blacked out. He unlocked his office. He unlocked the case where he kept confiscated weapons. He picked out a pistol, which he tucked into his belt, and another he slid into his pocket. He got on his bicycle and rode out of town.

  It was Sunday, so The Trout was dark. For a reason he could not explain he decided to stop. “Renard!” said a voice. “Where the hell have you been?” A man stepped from the shadows and pretended to study his watch, even though it was too dark to see it. Yves recognized him from the Marquis d’Estaing’s meetings. “C’mon, let’s go. We were supposed to meet at nine. The others went on ahead.”

  “I … I couldn’t,” said Yves. “I thought I’d catch up with you.”

  “Well, let’s go.” Yves put his bicycle in the weeds across from the tavern and got in the man’s car. They drove without speaking. They were going toward the field where the paratroopers were supposed to land.

  “Who’s here?” said Yves.

  “Nobody you know,” said the driver.

  “Jacques Courtois?” said Yves.

  “Nobody you know,” said the driver again. This time he looked over at Yves.

  He pulled the car onto a narrow lane that continued between tall hedges. “We’ve got to walk from here,” he said. He turned off the engine. He reached into the backseat and picked up a machine pistol. “C’mon, Renard. We’re wasting time.”

  The two men walked along the lane at a brisk clip. The moon did not give off much light. It went in and out behind clouds. Renard stumbled and almost fell. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “Well, just get moving, all right?” said the other man.

  After fifteen minutes they came over a rise. “Here we are,” said the man. They rounded a hedge and saw a group of men standing around smoking. They stopped talking as Yves and the man approached.

 
“So you found the straggler, huh?” Yves recognized the voice of Piet Chabrille.

  “I was with somebody,” said Yves. “I couldn’t leave without looking suspicious.”

  “Suspicious?” said someone else, and laughed. Yves didn’t recognize the voice.

  “We haven’t got much time,” said someone else.

  “No. We’re all here now, so let’s position ourselves.” Yves recognized one of the other policemen from the meeting. “The main thing is that we stay far apart and far enough away so that they don’t smell a trap. I’ve come up with a two-sided perimeter where they’ll be in the crossfire. Make sure your guns are loaded and cocked. Get comfortable and wait for my signal”—he made a sound like a fox barking—“then move forward.

  “Any questions? Okay, let’s go,” said the man. He stood up and ground out his cigarette. Everyone followed him. He positioned them two by two along two sides of a square maybe two hundred meters on a side. “I’ll keep you with me, Renard. I like to work with another cop,” he said.

  Yves sat staring into the darkness so intensely that he was afraid he would start seeing things. Suddenly a shape appeared across the field in front of him and moved to the center of the field. Then another one, then two more.

  Onesime was the first to arrive. Alexandre de Beaumont was the next. Then Jacques Courtois, Marie Piano. Anne Marie arrived. Everyone stared at the sky and waited to hear the sound of airplanes. August Pappe arrived. He walked quickly up to the group. “It’s a trap,” he said softly.

  “What?”

  “There are no planes. It’s a trap. Get out!” Everyone started to run. A fox barked and gunfire exploded from the edge of the field.

  Yves shot and killed the policeman beside him. He ran like a madman along the two-sided perimeter—tripping, screaming, shooting, shooting, shooting as many of the militia men as he could. But he couldn’t shoot them all. He could not shoot them fast enough to save anyone. His friends—Onesime, Anne Marie, Marie Piano, Jacques Courtois—all of them, they were all dead.