“And he can keep his lips sealed?” the Brit asked with concern.
“Max has been with the Maquis from the beginning. We can share anything with him.”
As Max offered the captain his hand, his eyes moved slowly from the captain’s face to his own commander’s and back again.
“Without getting too specific,” Roger told Max, “an Allied invasion of the south is coming soon.” The chief sat down at his desk, took a map of the region out of his briefcase, and smoothed it out. “American, British, and Free French forces will be involved and when they come here we need to be ready.”
Walking back toward his quarters showing the British officer the layout of the camp, they passed men sitting outside, chatting and enjoying the gentle refreshing breezes of a late July afternoon in the Cévennes.
“We’ll teach the Germans a thing or two.”
“They really do need a good lesson.”
“Why don’t we launch a sneak attack, catch them off-guard?”
“We have the guns and ammunition now.”
“We’re trained and ready to go.”
“And the Germans are scared.”
“So are the gendarmes.”
“And the Milice, damn them.”
“Hey Doc,” one of the newer Maquis called to Max. “Are we going to fight or what?”
Max stopped to look at his questioner, who was much younger than himself—really a boy. “Soon,” Max told him and then repeated with a touch of melancholy, “Soon.”
One thing troubled Max as they met up with André and explained the plans during the anticipated invasion. “Our only transportatioin is our small truck. Once fighting begins, we need another way to quickly get around.”
After a long, pained silence, Andre said, “I know where we can get a car.” He explained about the big black Buick sedan stashed in the Brignands’ barn. “It could be just what we need, assuming it still runs after sitting idle for almost four years. If it’s still where we hid it!”
Max smiled gratefully. “Let’s find out.”
André had found his brother at Le Tronc rhythmically wielding a scythe and sweating profusely. Quickly apprised about the potential invasion and the need for the Buick, Alex was happy to help. Not that he looked forward to a vehicle stained with blood from any fighting. But given the cause…
Finally reaching Soleyrols on foot—feeling both strange and encouraged to be so close to the place they had so long called home—they considered stopping at the Brignands’ café.
“Is that wise?” Alex asked. “To risk making our presence known? I know you’re tired but surely you’re not anxious for a cup of foul coffee.”
“I wasn’t thinking about coffee or a rest,” André replied, “just that we should warn the Brignands of what we’re doing. If someone sees us go into their barn unannounced we don’t want them coming after us with guns.”
The moment they walked inside, Albertine grabbed the Sauverin brothers’ hands and raced them into the back room, swiftly shutting the door though there were no customers to see or overhear them. André and Alex politely declined her efforts to ply them with food and drink, explaining their haste.
They caught up on each other’s family members swiftly and were delighted to learn everyone was reasonably well. Albertine lamented how much she missed the little Sauverins then couldn’t help blurting out Yvette’s news. “She’s getting married! And at such a time as this. Life goes on, eh? Maybe it’s important to show those Nazi bastards they can’t stop us from living our lives. But one thing breaks my heart. Hard as it is to find a fine handsome man in these dark days it’s harder to find a good dress! I know that sounds trivial but for a once-in-a-lifetime occasion…We can’t even come up with material to make one from scratch. My wedding gown’s so moth-eaten there’s not even enough to fashion a flower girl’s outfit.”
“Now now,” André consoled. “It might work out yet. When is the wedding?”
“In just a few weeks.”
Alex looked thoughtful but said nothing.
“No one can be sure,” André continued, “but the Allies might be here by then.”
“Oh,” Albertine gasped. “From your lips to God’s ears!”
At the old barn the brothers made their way stealthily through the door jammed by weeds, its hinges rusted from years of disuse and rough weather. They kicked up dust from dried hay as they moved to the rear of the barn’s lower level. Small farm implements and boards of wood they had stacked to help hide the canvas-covered car appeared undisturbed as, fortunately, did the Buick.
They pulled aside rakes, hoes, and pieces of lumber and pushed several mounds of old, desiccated hay into a corner. Then they lifted the canvas. The Buick’s dark paint showed through thick layers of dust.
After they rolled the canvas over the roof and off of the hood the car looked just as they remembered it apart from the dust. Its condition was excellent. The inside was almost pristine.
“Shall we see if it runs?” Alex asked, imagining driving back to Belgium.
André climbed the rickety steps leading to the loft. Alex watched him reach here and there until his hands described the familiar shape of the battery. Next to it André found the precious jar into which they had drained the fluid in the fall of 1940.
“Got it,” André called down excitedly.
“What about the gas?”
While André fished around for the gas can, Alex opened the car’s hood. Together the brothers poured in the acid to fill and replenish the dry battery cells. Then Alex dropped the battery into its housing and connected the cables. André added gas to the tank.
They agreed to leave the car on its blocks until they determined whether or not the engine would turn over. André pulled open the driver’s side door and felt under the mat for the key.
“Just where we left it.”
He climbed in gingerly, inserted the key into the ignition, and, after hesitating nervously, turned it to the start position. Slowly, gently, he depressed the starter button. Both men let out unconsciously held breaths as the engine responded fitfully.
“Stop it and try it again,” Alex suggested. “It would be very bad if after we got out onto the road the car stalled and we couldn’t get it started.”
“The oil is congealed,” André theorized. “It’ll be sluggish as it works lose. Warming up it will liquefy again and spread along the cylinder walls.” The test was run and the engine turned over much more rapidly as if it had regained familiarity with what it was supposed to do. “Amazing,” André called out, relieved and exhilarated.
They listened to the strong, steady thrum of the engine as if they couldn’t hear enough of that wonderful sound. Almost regretfully, André shut it off again.
Working the jack was a slow process. They took turns, finally settling the car onto each of its tires. The tires clearly needed air but remarkably they had retained enough tire pressure to drive on.
They left the trailer behind because with it attached it would be impossible to maneuver the Buick through narrow mountain passes. André found the sensation of driving again peculiar but enjoyable.
“I hope you have your driver’s license with you,” Alex joked.
“Worse than that,” André said, laughing and playing along. “The car’s registration has expired.”
The second week of August went very slowly. For Max Maurel in the temporary hospital at La Tour Du Viala, the wait was unbearable and the boredom was getting to everyone. How many times could they clean the premises, review the supplies, and test their equipment?
On the fifteenth of August the wait came to an abrupt, overwhelming end. Operation Dragoon landed three American divisions at beaches code-named Alpha, Delta, and Camel along the Côte d’Azur. French General de Lattre de Tassigny brought his forces ashore in southern France, five thousand French troops were airlifted to Le Muy, and there was a seaborne landing on the Île du Levant, between Toulon and Saint-Tropez. The Allies encountered strikingly littl
e resistance, swiftly conquering six towns and taking more than two thousand prisoners.
Suddenly energized after what felt like an enormously long sleep, the Maquis struck numerous German positions, derailed more trains, blew up more bridges, blocked roads, downed telephone and telegraph lines, and damaged factories. The German army struggled to protect its garrisons and to preserve every available means of retreat.
The numberless young men who had come into the Resistance camps after D-Day were finally granted their wish to take the conflict to the enemy. Descending from scattered camps onto roads throughout the Lozère and into towns where the Wehrmacht had bivouacked, they assaulted Germans joyfully and viciously. Skirmishes ballooned into full-fledged fights and sustained battles. The Maquis fired down from hills and from behind stone walls but the German army possessed superior armaments. Nazi machine guns replied with an intensity that overpowered the lightly armed Maquisards, who retreated into the woods and forests from which they had barely emerged.
The next ten days were extraordinary. Events moved swiftly. The rapid collapse of France in 1940 seemed mirrored by the German pullback now.
Though inundated and beleaguered, the hospital staff managed to acquire a radio someone was always listening to. News also reached them as new patients came in. Every day brought encouragement from the north and the south: the citadel at Saint-Malo surrendered to the Allies, Orléans and Châteaudun were freed from their German captors. Hitler ordered his troops out of the south of France. Marshal Pétain refused to move to an area dominated by the Wehrmacht, causing the Führer to give direct orders for him and his staff to be arrested and interned at Belfort. The entire Vichy government resigned.
In Paris, Resistance fighters began rebelling openly. American General Patton’s armored division crossed the Seine thirty miles northwest of the capital. The Germans petitioned for a short-lived truce, allowing some of their cornered troops to withdraw.
With stunning rapidity French Resistance forces claimed control of eight départements representing ten percent of the country. And in the south, Allied forces stretched from Cannes to Marseille and from Toulon to Arles, only seventy-five kilometers from Alès. Widespread rumors placed General de Gaulle on French soil. Then in the last week of August General Choltitz, commander of the German garrison in Paris, disobeyed orders that the city be razed and instead surrendered. Despite the last few German snipers, de Gaulle joined a ceremonial parade proclaiming the liberation of Paris and the establishment of a new Republic.
Still the enemy fought on from widely scattered positions. After the Allies captured Avignon, most of the German army in the region began withdrawing northward along the Rhône. Fighting in the eastern Cévennes became even more intense. Great numbers of Maquisards marched north behind the Germans, making their retreat miserable and often fatal.
When the irregular but dedicated Resistance troops finally reached and joined the more conventional army of de Lattre de Tassigny, the real war was just beginning for them.
The news spread quickly and the radio confirmed it: town-by-town, city-by-city, control was being ceded to the Free French. Even when Alès was liberated, the idea that the Lozère was already rid of Germans was too shocking to comprehend fully.
“How does it feel?” an excited Max asked André, who had come to La Tour Du Viala.
“I’m relieved,” André answered weakly, “but emotionally and physically exhausted. More than anything I regret I can’t be with my family to share this moment. But I know they’re enjoying their freedom. Just to step outside unafraid…” André smiled ironically. “It’s funny. We’ve waited, worked, prayed for this day and now that it’s here I feel like I’ve stepped into a vacuum. Because I don’t know where I should be: Belgium? France? I’m not a man of two countries but none. France clearly isn’t mine and I can’t go back to Brussels yet because Belgium has not been liberated. I’m not sure I’m ready to go anyway. After all this I feel unprepared to be free. Everything I’ve struggled for these last four years has been accomplished so now what do I do? My family and I can be together again without interference and nothing could be more wonderful than that. But we don’t belong—I don’t belong—anywhere.”
André stared out across the valley toward the mountain ridge and La Font. Was that where he should go?
“You belong,” Max told him earnestly. “You’re part of the Cévennes now, part of us. You and your family have given so generously of yourselves—that’s why you were accepted by the Cévenols, protected by us. And that’s why you should feel warm, welcome, comfortable here. Now that we’re all free you can finally see how we truly behave, unafraid of getting shipped off to Germany.” He reached out a hand to André’s shoulder, hoping his touch would convey more strongly than words what he wanted to say: You can stay.
André’s tumultuous confusion cleared. He felt great calm and comfort—a fuller, more gratifying sense of release than any news had ever brought him. He knew now that he was among true friends even more than he would be in his beloved Brussels. The more he thought of it—and he had been thinking about it since arriving in this rugged, isolated, stunningly beautiful land—the more he realized it had never mattered whether the natives had known the Sauverins only as “that family from Belgium” or “the people on the farm at La Font.” Their openness, thoughtfulness, and generosity had been the same as if they’d been on a first-name basis.
The simple faith practiced here in easy ways now seemed improbably complex to André. Will it all pass as if it was a dream—cruel sometimes but also glorious?
Unanswerable questions assailed him. Will the next generation ever know or understand what has happened here? Is life worth all this or has the war made life’s value even greater? What happens when the armies have passed and civilian rule is reestablished? Will the winners be able to forgive the losers? Will those who supported the Vichy government and even actively aided the Nazis accept the new order, which may feel like the old order restored?
Max wore a bemused expression on his sweet face. “Any thoughts you’d care to share?”
André sighed. Sitting atop a mountain in the Lozère he felt almost as if he were in the laboratory of the department of chemistry at God’s own university.
Let the experiment proceed. The truth will become evident. Then we shall know.
Focusing on Max, he answered earnestly, “I feel the people of the Cévennes possess depth of character, constancy, and a commitment to a greater truth than we are readily able to see. Recent events have troubled, confused, and frightened me. Will liberation change the Cévenols for me, shine a different light on what have seemed to me this people’s timeless values? I can barely express myself as I ponder all that has happened and all that may be. But I hope with a greater fervor than I knew myself capable of that I have not been deceived in my perception of these people. That what has been offered to me and my family is not an illusion. That when this dream ends as it seems to be doing it will prove to have been no dream at all but my first true experience of the deepest reality.”
Max smiled the open innocent smile of unfettered, unconquerable youth. Was this the way he smiled before the complicated, conflicted life necessitated by the Nazis?
“You need not fear,” Max reassured him staunchly. “These people are real, steadfast, solid, sincere. Their beliefs are transcendent: beyond the visible, outside of time. And they possess the endless joy that comes from knowing without doubt that there is a greater truth to guide and uphold us than is evidenced by the ways of men.”
André closed his eyes. He knew Max held no greater belief in God than Alex did. Yet he knew them both to be deeply spiritual people whether or not they accepted or acknowledged it. Oh how true it was that even the agnostic can be possessed of the highest faith—greater than any mere mortal’s conception of the deity.
The last German soldiers at Toulon and Marseille surrendered. The French Provisional Government was firmly established in Paris. On the first of September, G
eneral Eisenhower set up headquarters in France. Mopping-up operations continued throughout the newly reestablished nation and it became possible for U.S., British, and Canadian forces to turn their attention elsewhere—as the Soviet army had done on the Eastern Front, sweeping through the Baltic states, eastern Poland, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and Romania.
On Monday the second of September, the Allies crossed into Belgium. The British liberated Brussels and Antwerp the next day.
“I must write Professor Pinkus right away,” André exclaimed when Max brought him the news. “I must find out how he and all our colleagues have fared and discover whether he knows when we can expect the Free University of Brussels to reopen.”
Max shared André’s excitement but it also made him sad. He had long been painfully aware that the days of André and the other Sauverins were numbered in France. But he had been too busy for this realization to have its full impact. Now…
Now the liberation of Belgium was as spotty as that of France, so it still wasn’t safe for anyone to return. But as more Belgian cities fell to the Allies—Ghent, Lille, Louvain, Malines, Courtrai, Liège—and after U.S. troops crossed the Albert Canal, the Meuse River, and the Moselle, it was only natural for André’s mind to turn more strongly toward family and home just as Max’s turned to Fela and Alès. All of which made it hard for Max at the end of the first week of September to tell André what he needed to say until André gave him an opening.
Softly André asked, “How much longer do you think I’ll be useful here? I’d dearly love to go to Le Salson to be with Denise and our little ones. It’s been such a long time since we’ve been together without fear.”
“And it may be a little longer yet,” Max finally said as gently as he could, “for I need you for one more mission.”
André eyed him warily. “Just one?”
“Yes. And for not much longer than a week. But it’s important I assure you. And I need you to do it. I wouldn’t ask otherwise. After this I promise you can return to your family.”
In This Hospitable Land Page 41
