Tranchet had escaped from the concentration camp of Le Vernet in France, hiding for days in the outgrowth of the barriers of hedge-thorns that circled the camp instead of barbed wire. He had made his way up through the hostile French countryside at night to the Belgian border, and then across terrain he knew well to his own fields and farmhouse and his wife and child. But in the last half mile he had sighted a tank and German soldiers, twenty or more, bedded down for the night two meadows away, waiting for the morning light.
When the Americans entered the farmhouse that December night they found the Tranchet family crazed by terror, human beings unable to further absorb or accept or come to terms with human stress.
Claud Tranchet told the Americans about the German soldiers, and then put both arms protectively about his dazed wife and child. They had nothing to fear, he had told his family, and even now, in the warmth and familiarity of his own study, General Weir could remember the singsong words, the hiss of icy breath through the Belgian’s broken teeth.
The man had become mesmerized by the winter-dead lilac bush at the side of a stone barn — they could all see it beyond the broken window — a spray of dark sticks, slick with ice, but alive and meaningful to Claud Tranchet, a promise of life. It was a miracle, he told his family that night, a portent of the spring to come and of many other springs. The bush was filled with blossoms, he told them. It was a sign to them from God that they would live. Look, look, he cried, see it. The flowers are purple, they are wet with honey. Smell their fragrance. Even the Germans will know that our prayers have been answered, the Almighty has chosen...
Marta and her mother, mute and exhausted by fear, were lulled with these feverish rantings. They became trusting, passive, huddled together, staring out at the frozen bush, believing the miracle had happened.
Private Weir had waited in the house until dawn. Then he hooked three grenades to his belt, felt his way through a hole in the shattered wall and took off at a crouching run across the fields to where Tranchet had said he’d sighted Germans.
Weir, raised in the rough and snowy fields of Illinois, ran swiftly, moving like a yearling bear, silently, without wasting muscle. He needed the dark to hide him from the Germans, the dawn to show him where to go. A bear in pursuit can catch anything it wants to, he knew, not by running apace, but just by moving the whole body faster. Scotty Weir willed his young body to an almost bearlike speed.
Within minutes after leaving the farmhouse he had stopped behind a stand of trees. The German guard at a machine gun mount had come suddenly alert, swinging the gun position away from the farmhouse and trapped American soldiers and toward the young private crouching in the trees. But the guard’s actions came too late. Weir lobbed his grenades into the German encampment, and the three blasts, seconds apart, left little evidence, metal or human, in that huge crater to indicate what had been waiting there, what had terrorized the Tranchets into praying to a lilac bush.
Private Weir was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery. When he went back again to the farm it was spring, and the lilac tree was indeed in bloom, the sweet fragrance a benediction over the scarred and battered farmhouse.
Weir did not know exactly what he expected to find there, but he knew a part of him would be left forever at that Belgian farm. Young as he was, he realized there was a fulcrum for every soldier, a balance point in peacetime or in battle, when he knew the value of his uniform, when he behaved not just as a soldier or automaton, but as a sentient and courageous man. It was then he had decided to become a career soldier.
Over the years Weir and Marta Tranchet had kept in touch, cemented by the memory of fear and trust that for one night had been as strong and binding between them as any physical passion.
Maggie Weir had been understanding, even generous about his friendship with the Tranchets over the years. Weir had been the correspondent, but at Christmas when Marta married and when her only child was born, it was Maggie who remembered with cards and gifts. She had gone with him one winter to the LePont farm, now run by Marta’s husband, and stood with Colonel Weir and Marta at the window, looking out at the same lilac bush, fuller, taller, more twisted now, yet alive and greening under its coat of ice.
“I still believe it was a miracle that night,” Marta had whispered. “First the lilacs and then the young soldier...”
Maggie Weir had glanced down and seen that the young woman’s hand was entwined with her husband’s, narrow lingers with a gold wedding band, knuckles white, straining with emotion.
“Of course, it’s a kind of love she feels for you, Scotty,” she had said to the colonel as their Army touring car sped over the dark roads back to Liege. “One can know it just by listening and watching. You were with her at the crisis of her life. I can’t allow her to love you in my way, but except for death itself, I can think of no emotion more binding than mutual fear. You will always share that, you and little Marta.”
General Weir rearranged the letters and snapshots and wondered why he hadn’t thought to take a picture of Maggie and Marta together that cold afternoon. No, the mapcase was peopled only with Tranchets and young Claud Tranchet-LeRoi and Tarbert Weir, recorded there in photographs, faded black and white to rich color, boy soldier to full man.
Weir tried Georgetown again and this time Ann Stigmuller answered. “Scotty,” she said, “so wonderful to hear from you. Are you in town? Can we see you?”
“I’ll take a raincheck, Annie. I’m down on the farm in Illinois. I’ve been trying to reach you for a couple of hours.”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “That means the girls have been on the upstairs phone. But at least they’re home, and that’s something for teenagers these days. But then you never had any trouble at all with Mark...”
She caught herself sharply, and he heard her light laugh. “Damn, Scotty, I wish you were in town. We could talk and talk. Buck still starts every other sentence with ‘Scotty always said’...”
“If he’s there, Annie, I’d like to talk to him.”
“Hold on,” she said, and lowered her voice. “We have a couple of godawful bores here tonight, Pentagon-type senators that Buck has to toady up to now that he’s number one man in Appropriations and Budget. Buck’s like you, Scotty, he hates the politics that go with wearing stars. He walked them down to the greenhouse with coffee and brandy. He said he’d show them the cymbidiums I’ve been cultivating, though Buck wouldn’t know his ass from an aster, as our old gardener used to say. Sorry, Scotty. That was vulgar of me. I’ll buzz the greenhouse.”
General Buck Stigmuller had served as Scotty Weir’s aide in Korea for three years, and their paths had crossed again at military college and later in Germany. When Mark was at boarding school in Frankfurt, Stigmuller had often played surrogate at father-son affairs.
When he came on the line he said, “Stigmuller reporting, sir. Give me the number of the hill you want taken and cut me loose. How the hell are you, Scotty?”
“I’ll understand if you can’t answer me right off, Buck. Ann told me your social situation there. But I need a favor.”
“Not a favor,” Stigmuller said. “Make it an order and you’ve got it. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like you to take down the names and serial numbers of four deceased soldiers.” Then he told the general about Mark’s phone call and his request for help from the Army.
“I’m glad you called me first, and I’ll get right on it,” Stigmuller said. “You want background, profiles and/or records on these men to see if they interrelate, right? Aside from their uniforms and their deaths, what do they have in common. I gather that’s what Mark’s after.