by John Harris
Tarnera sounded sceptical. ‘I’m afraid that’s a figment of the Fuhrer’s imagination, like the Reich that would last for a thousand years. Quite a lot of it’s already crumbled in Russia and Italy.’
‘Shut up, Tarnera!’ Klemens was wide awake now and bad-tempered with lack of sleep. ‘You ask for trouble. How did you find out? From Dijon?’
‘No, Herr Oberst. It came through headquarters at La Roche-Guyon and via Le Mans.’
‘I find it hard to believe.’
‘Perhaps we’ve all been kidding ourselves,’ Tarnera said dryly. ‘I gather Paris didn’t believe it either.’
They didn’t even believe it in Néry.
Marie-Claude was picking up the twigs and small branches that had teen snapped off by the wind, and her mother was sweeping up the petals of the blown roses that scattered the front of tie house, when Reinach fell into the yard over the wall at the back.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ he yelled. ‘They’ve landed in Normandy!’
‘What!’
‘Four o’clock this morning’ Near Caen I Put the radio on!’
As they switched on, the BBC was already playing ‘La Marseillaise’, and Reinach, Madame Lamy and Marie-Claude stood still and solemn and straight. As it finished, they were all reaching to embrace each other when it changed to ‘God Save The King’, and they all looked hurriedly at Urquhart and Neville and stiffened again. As the last notes died away, Marie-Claude’s face split in one of her wide electric grins. It died immediately as a new tune started.
‘What’s this ?’ she demanded.
‘ “Star-Spangled Banner”,’ Neville said. ‘It’s the American one.’
Marie-Claude’s eyes blazed. ‘For God’s sake, do we have to listen to “The Red Flag”, and the Dutch and the Belgian and the Australian and Scottish national anthems before we can move?’ She dived for the kitchen and came back with a bottle of marc and began to splash it into tumblers in vast helpings that burned their throats.
‘Eisenhower made a broadcast in French,’ Reinach said. ‘His accent wasn’t too bad. I almost understood him. De Gaulle’s going to speak at lunch-time. The allies have kept their promises. It’s up to us now to keep ours.’
The yell was already going round the fields - ‘They’ve landed!’ - and Lionel Dring appeared at Father Pol’s presbytery, his eyes blazing with excitement. ‘They’ve come, Father! We should ring the bells.’
‘There aren’t any bells,’ Father Pol pointed out. ‘The Germans stole them to make guns.’
‘Then, for God’s sake, let’s bang a drum or something! The allies have come back to France!’
Caught by the tempest, Father Pol sent word that there would be a special mass, and by mid-morning black-clad figures in their best clothes were heading towards the church. Everyone in the village turned up - even Neville who wasn’t a Catholic. The shabby old building with its carved stations of the cross and its agonized Christ, its worn seats and peeling pink-washed walls, was full of optimism and joy and hope. The Baronne arrived on the arm of her great-grandson and followed by old Balmaceda - looking like an ancient doll with her bright artificial hair set against the dramatic black of the Baron.
Father Pol had decided that it was time to follow the example of Father Xavier in Rolandpoint and was already thundering away. ‘Nazism and Vichy fascist institutions are anti-Christian!’ he was shouting. ‘It is our duty to contribute to their defeat!’
When they’d finished shouting ‘Vive la France’, they sang ‘La Marseillaise’, the tune surging to the roof, then they all streamed out into the sunshine purged and sanctified.
Klein-Wuttig watched them, puzzled. There was no sign of war in Néry and his orders were not to provoke trouble. Yet it filled his brain with worms as he saw tricolours being waved at him by children too small to argue with, because he was fully aware that older brothers and sisters had passed them out and were carefully watching his reactions.
The radios remained on all day, heavy with German announcements and threats, and instructions from Radio Paris and Radio Vichy. Later, de Gaulle spoke.
‘It is he!’ Madame Lamy breathed, almost as if she were hearing a god give tongue.
‘He’s only a man,’ Marie-Claude said, looking at Neville and Urquhart,
‘He’s France! He means France to us!‘
‘He means nothing at all unless we hear him.’
There was a lot of static and a few precautionary thumps from Madame Lamy; nobody in the whole village was making any pretence of doing anything else but listen. ‘The Battle of France has begun,’ the sombre voice intoned. ‘In the nation, in the empire, and in the armed forces there is now one purpose, one desire. Look upward. There, where the burden of our blood and years lies like a lowering cloud upon us, there the light of our greatness is shining through.’ It struck exactly the right note and left them all elated and entranced.
‘He said we had to destroy the enemy,’ Sergeant Dréo yelled.
‘And the Germans,’ Father Pol pointed out dryly, ‘have said that their troops have been given orders to shoot anyone co-operating with the invasion.’
‘That’s right,’ Guardian Moch agreed. ‘In fact, Pétain says we’re going to be plunged into civil war, and Goebbels says the allies have done exactly what the Germans wanted and walked into a trap.’
‘You’ll have us believe soon that Hitler planned the invasion to make a German victory,’ Marie-Claude snorted. The Germans will collapse.’
‘No,’ Sergeant Dréo said. ‘They’re good fighters. I know. It’ll be a long struggle. We must make preparations. Is everyone in the réseau ready?’
Reinach looked sheepish. ‘Some of them.’
‘Why not all?’
‘Because some of them have gone off north to see what they can do. Gaudin’s brother, Yves Rapin. And young Guelis. The barman from the Frontière came over from Rolandpoint for them. Even young Hénault. He rolled up his father’s 1914 kit and set off after them. They said they were sick of waiting here for something to happen.’
They stared accusingly at Urquhart, as though it were his fault, and Dréo pounded the table.
‘We must do something!’ he shouted, and his words seemed like a special plea to the Almighty for guidance.
But what?
With few young men left - even, for that matter, few middle-aged men who’d been brave in the other war - the knowledge that they were old and rusty made the following days bitter. There was an enormous sense of anti-climax, and they sat far into the night waiting for things to crystallize.
More youths vanished, to appear in the hills behind the village, wearing scarves round their necks and clutching rifles and Sten guns, magazines sticking out of every pocket. De Frager was prominent among them and there was a great deal of show, but not much action except that a few telephone lines were cut. There were also rumours of Milice and collaborationists further to the east being caught and beaten up or even shot. Then they heard that the narrow-gauge railway down to St Seigneur had been torn up five kilometres from Rolandpoint, and the feeling that something was happening at last lifted their hearts and filled them full of elation - until they learned that the job had been so badly botched it had been repaired almost immediately. Brisson’s brother, who was a garde-voie and responsible for that stretch of track, had been taken out and shot although he’d had nothing to do with the sabotage. His son was said to be walking round with a gun in his pocket swearing to kill the Communist who’d done, it. It made them all hesitate a little.
Finally they learned that at Noidan-sur-Clamery, over to the west of Dijon, the villagers, made bold by a parachute drop, had openly attacked a German column. Two lorries had been set on fire and three men killed, but the following day German-controlled Cossacks had swept up from Dijon; fifteen men and boys had been shot and several women raped. The guns that had appeared in the woods round Néry vanished immediately and the young men were back in their homes that night, worried sick in case they’d bee
n seen.
‘We must do something,’ Reinach nagged. ‘London have said we must.’
‘You’re not strong enough,’ Urquhart pointed out. ‘Your strength lies in simply existing.’
Neville sighed. He was profoundly touched by the need of the people of Néry to salvage their pride, but he’d also read enough history to know in his heart that Urquhart was right and they were wrong. Night after night he had defended their need to do something and every time Urquhart had demolished his arguments with his experience. Yet, despite his emotional involvement, his common sense told him that the time hadn’t yet come for them to act.
‘In case you haven’t noticed it,’ he said, ‘you live in what will probably be the last bit of France to be liberated. You’re a long way from British airfields, close to Germany and in an area that’s strongly held.’ He saw their eyes on his face and drew a deep breath. ‘Wait,’ he urged. The Germans are avoiding trouble because they think you’re stronger than you are, and one of the first historical principles of war is to make your enemy think just that. If you attack them, they’ll know you’re not.’
Father Pol frowned. ‘I notice you talk a great deal about this history, my son,’ he observed thoughtfully.
‘History’s a part of warfare,’ Neville said. ‘English soldiers learn it at Sandhurst, the French at St Cyr, the Americans at West Point, the Germans at Potsdam. It helps them to avoid trouble the next time the same situation arises. British cavalry have always been careful to avoid getting themselves into the mess they found themselves in at Balaclava.’
Father Pol’s eyebrows rose. ‘There were British cavalry at Balaclava?’ he said, surprised. ‘I thought it was the Chasseurs d’Afrique who won that battle.’
‘It wasn’t won,’ Neville said more harshly. ‘And it wasn’t the Chasseurs d’Afrique who lost it.’
For a moment, Father Pol seemed about to take up the challenge but then he changed his mind. ‘This history,’ he probed. ‘You have studied it?’
Neville nodded.
‘And it is this same history which makes you suggest that we should not yet attack the Germans?’
Neville leaned forward. Time’s on your side,’ he pointed out. ‘Any military planner would tell you the same.’
‘Even this Wellington you speak about?’ Dréo asked.
‘Even Napoleon. And if anyone knew his history, he did.’
Father Pol nodded, satisfied, ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I am convinced. We will wait.’
The others seemed to agree with him. All except Reinach who got to his feet and stared at them with angry eyes. He seemed as taut and tense as a tightly wound spring.
‘I just wish I were in Normandy!’ he growled.
2
‘If something doesn’t happen soon,’ Urquhart said, ‘this bloody place will explode.’ For a whole month there had been no sign of the liberation they’d expected, no sign of any backward movement from the Germans. And when the weather at the end of June deteriorated into gale force winds which wrecked shipping off the Normandy coast, broke up floating piers and swept away helpless vessels, it even began to look as though it would be 1948 before Burgundy was freed.
‘For the love of God,’ Reinach raged, ‘when shall we be able to do something?’
Though in Dijon and Besancon railway engines were being disabled, and points, roundhouses and bridges blown up, seen against the vast panorama of the invasion, they were mere pinpricks which the Germans always savagely avenged. In Gascony, twelve hundred of them had wiped out eighty men of the Maquis, shooting the wounded or smashing their skulls with rifle butts before forbidding their families to collect their bodies so that they were left in the sun to rot. Only on the Vercors massif, near Grenoble, was there any organized resistance.
‘They’ve been free there since the eleventh,’ Reinach said. ‘They simply hung out flags and sang “La Marseillaise”, and got away with it.’
The news stirred the men of Rolandpoint to demand their weapons back. If resistance were possible in the south, they argued, then it should be possible in the Cote d’Or. For many in Néry the invasion had been set up to liberate not France but Néry, and more young men dug out their fathers’ equipment from the other war and disappeared towards the fighting.
‘If we don’t do something soon,’ Reinach said, ‘we shall have no young men left.’
‘Wait,’ Neville insisted. ‘For God’s sake, wait! When you move it’s got to be when they can’t call in the tanks or the Luftwaffe. Guerrilla warfare must never condense into a solid body. Clausewitz said that. He was a German, and German generals have all read him. Your time will come; every German scheme in history’s contained the seed of its own destruction.’
‘This doesn’t sound like the fair-play English,’ Ernouf growled.
‘It’s a good way to fight a war,’ Urquhart growled back.
In the atmosphere of frustration and fearful hope, the news of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Haute Vienne dropped like a bombshell. The Germans had mistaken the place for Oradour-sur-Vayres, where fighting had taken place, and the SS had swept down to shoot all the men and lock all the women and children in the church which they had then destroyed with explosives. As the people died, the village itself had been drenched with petrol and set ablaze. Six hundred and forty-three people had died and when a mass was held by the Bishop of Limoges, time bombs, planted by the Milice, had been discovered in the crypt of the cathedral.
Nobody else argued with Neville.
Unknown to the villagers, the Germans were as edgy as they were.
To Colonel Klemens things seemed to be getting out of hand. Intelligence reports stated that fifty thousand Frenchmen had been secretly armed and were only waiting their chance.
‘It’s exaggerated, Herr Oberst,’ Klein-Wuttig insisted. ‘It’s not possible. They haven’t enough ammunition. Unskilled soldiers waste it. They’d need millions of rounds.’
There are three thousand people on the Vercors massif,’ Tarnera pointed out, ‘simply defying us.’
Klein-Wuttig’s mouth twisted. ‘If that’s all they’re doing,’ he said, ‘they don’t bother me.’
With the tension building up, the news came that the allies were at last on the move again in Italy and had reached the Arno, Ancona and Leghorn, and on 20 July General Dannhüber arrived at Néry for a hasty conference. Klemens drank a little more than usual, so that as soon as Dannhüber had gone he found himself dozing at his desk. The telephone jerked him back to wakefulness. It was Tarnera.
‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘Not another invasion, surely?’
‘Perhaps even more, Herr Oberst. I’ve just had Paris on the telephone. They’ve got a report that the Führer’s been assassinated.’
‘What?’ Klemens was wide awake and bolt upright at once. ‘It’s not possible!’
‘It’s not even sense with all those drugs he takes these days, it’s like killing a corpse.’
‘Shut up, Tarnera,’ Klemens shouted. ‘If you can’t keep quiet, I’ll have you posted away from here - if only for your own safety. Sturmbannfuhrer Frobinius was up here the other day and he was asking about you. If he gets it into his head to dislike you, there’s nothing I can do. Go on with your report.’
There was a long silence on the telephone and when Tarnera’s voice came again it was quiet and controlled and devoid of sarcasm. ‘It was heard on the Swiss radio, Herr Oberst. They picked up a Berlin announcement. There’s a state of emergency in Germany and the Wehrmacht’s taken over the protection of the Reich. It seems the conspirators are also in control in Munich, Vienna and Paris.’
Klemens drew a deep breath. He was an uncomplicated man. For a long time he’d seen victory slipping through German fingers, and this new situation was one he’d been envisaging with a sort of transfixed horror for some time.
‘Have you heard how they regard it in Dijon?’ he asked.
‘With what I would call doubt and confusion, Herr Oberst,’ Tarnera said. They’re
waiting for confirmation.’
‘What do you think we ought to do?’
‘The same as Dijon, Herr Oberst. Nothing.’
By evening, they were all sweating on the radio news. There had been warnings of an announcement and at six o’clock it came.
‘An attempt has been made on the Führer’s life,’ it stated. ‘But he has received only slight burns and bruises and no other injuries.’
Tarnera frowned. ‘He’s got a charmed life,’ he said.
Klein-Wuttig turned. ‘Were you expecting he might die?’
‘I think we’d better make our number with Dijon,’ Klemens said. ‘Please call them for me, Tarnera.’
As Tarnera handed over the telephone, Klemens seated himself at the Baronne’s table. ‘I’ve just heard the announcement, General,’ he said smoothly. ‘Let me be the first to state my loyalty to the Führer.’
‘I should hold your water,’ Dannhüber barked back bluntly. ‘I’ve just had a signal by teleprinter signed by Field Marshal von Witzleben who, as you’ll doubtless remember, was dismissed in 1942. It states quite categorically that the Fuhrer’s dead and that non-combatant Party leaders have seized power. It declares a military state of emergency with Witzleben in command of the armed forces.’
Klemens’ jaw sagged. ‘Where does that put us?’
General Dannhüber was in no doubt about where it put him. ‘It puts me,’ he said, ‘exactly where I was before. And, if you’ve any sense, that’s exactly where it should put you.’
As Klemens put the telephone down uncertainly, Klein-Wuttig reached for his hat. ‘I’ll make a tour of the command,’ he said. ‘These French bastards are bound to try to make something of it.’
He wasn’t far wrong. In St Seigneur a man ran from a bar shouting, This is it! The swine will collapse without him to shove a ramrod up their backsides!’
Yelling hysterically, he tried to snatch a rifle from a German sentry and for his trouble was immediately seized and shot. From tearful relatives it appeared he was a habitual drunkard, known as the Fleabag because of his indifferent personal habits, and only his dying had redeemed a wasted life. Since the news of the Berlin conspiracy had not yet been broadcast on the French radio, the owner of the bar was also shot - for listening to the BBC.
