De Milja liked him. Forthright, handsome, with a scrupulous sense of honor. The best of the French, de Milja thought, were the incarnations of heroes in boys’ books. Or girls’ books—because the principle was twice as true for the French women. De Milja had seen them face down the Germans more than once; iron-willed idealists, proud and free, and quite prepared to die to keep it that way.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Gache,” Bonneau called out, coasting on his bicycle. Jeanne-Marie echoed the greeting.
Monsieur Gache was a fourteenth-century peasant. He’d loomed up through the milky-gray mist holding a long switch, surrounded by a half-dozen cows, their breaths steaming, bells clanking. He squinted at de Milja from beneath a heavy brow, his glance suspicious and hostile. He knew every pebble and cowpie in these fields—perhaps this stranger was aiming to help himself to a few. Well, he’d know about it soon enough.
It’s spring, start of the war season in Europe, de Milja thought. And Monsieur Gache knew, in some ancient, intuitive sense, exactly who he was and what his appearance meant. Nothing good, certainly. Caesar likely sent somebody up here in the spring of 56 b.c. to take a look at the Gauls—and there was Monsieur Gache and his six cows.
“That’s old Gache,” Bonneau called back to him. “It’s his uncle’s land we’ll be using.”
De Milja grunted assent, implying that it seemed a good idea. He hoped it was. This was something worked out between people in the countryside, such rural arrangements being typically far too complicated to be successfully explained to outsiders.
They pedaled on for fifteen minutes, threading their way among great expanses of plowed black earth separated by patches of old-growth forest, oak and beech, left standing as windbreak. The cow path ended at a small stream and Bonneau dismounted like a ten-yearold, riding a little way on one pedal, then hopping off.
“Oop-la!” he said with a laugh. He grinned cheerfully, a man who meant to like whatever life brought him that day. Wounded during the German attack, he had fought on for twelve hours with only a gunner left alive in his tank.
“Now, sir, we shall have to walk,” Jeanne-Marie said. “For, perhaps, twenty-five minutes.”
“Exactly?” de Milja said.
“In good weather, close to it.”
“If she says it, it’s probably true,” Bonneau said wearily, admiring his sister and teasing her in the same breath.
“Here is the Creuse,” she said, pointing across a field.
They could see it from the hill, a ribbon of quiet water that flowed through brush-lined banks and joined, a few miles downstream near the town of Tournon, the Gartempe. This in turn became part of the Loire, and all of it eventually emptied into the Atlantic at the port of Saint-Nazaire.
What mattered was the confluence of the rivers—a geographical feature visible from an airplane flying on a moonlit night. They walked on in silence. The field was a good distance from any road, and therefore a good distance from German motorized transport. If the Germans saw parachutes floating from the sky, they were going to have to organize an overland expedition to go see about the problem.
The field itself had been chosen, de Milja thought, with great care. “It’s Jeanne-Marie’s choice,” Bonneau explained. “She is a serious naturalist—turns up everywhere in the countryside, so nobody notices what she does.”
“I’ve paced it more than once,” Jeanne-Marie said. “It is as suggested, about 650 by 250 yards.”
They walked its perimeter. “There were stumps, but I had our workmen haul them out with the plow horses.” Silently, on behalf of a descending parachutist, de Milja was grateful for her forethought. He saw also that somebody had moved big stones to one side of the field.
“How many people will you have?” de Milja asked.
“Four, perhaps. Six altogether.”
“You’ll need brushwood for your fires. It’s best to store it under canvas to keep it dry. Then the fires should be set in the shape of an arrow, giving wind direction.”
“Yes,” Jeanne-Marie said. “We know that.”
De Milja smiled at her. The mysterious foreigner who came from nowhere and told them things they already knew. She stood, holding her bicycle by the handlebars, in front of a huge French spring sky; a few strands of hair had escaped from the front of her kerchief and she brushed them back impatiently.
“Shall we have something before we go back?” Bonneau said.
Jeanne-Marie grinned to herself and nodded yes. She untied a cloth-wrapped packet from the back of her bicycle. They sat on the rim of the field—true to the suggested standard, Jeanne-Marie had located a slightly concave area—and ate bread and crumbly farm cheese and last fall’s apples, dried-out and sweet.
“Something must be done, and we hope it is soon,” Bonneau said. “The people here don’t like the Germans, but they are drifting. Pétain speaks on the radio and says that all this has happened to us because France was immoral and self-indulgent. A number of people believe that, others will do whatever makes them comfortable at that moment. One lately hears the word attentisme—the philosophy of waiting. Do nothing, we’ll see what happens next. This is dangerous for France, because here we don’t really live in a country, you know. We live in our houses with our families, that’s our true nationality, and what’s best is determined from that point of view.”
It was Jeanne-Marie who answered her brother. “The English will do what they can,” she said, a snap in her voice. “But not from any tender feeling for the French. We’re allies, not friends.”
“Again she’s right,” de Milja said.
A local train west, then to Nantes, then north on a series of locals. Very, very careful now, he told himself. Where he was going the Germans were sensitive, because they had a secret.
As the train rolled to a stop at each little town, de Milja could see he was in the country of Madame Roubier. Brittany. Tall redheads with fair, freckled skin. Sharp-eyed—not easily fooled. Often venal, because it was them against the world, had always been so, and this unending war was fought with wealth.
It was late afternoon when he reached the town of Vannes, down the coast of Brittany from L’Orient, one of the bomber fields used in the Luftwaffe campaign against Britain. North from Vannes was Brest—on the south shore of the widening English Channel, across from Plymouth, on the Cornish coast. No doubt about the bomber field, Vannes railroad station was full of German airmen, returning from leave or heading off to sinful Paris for ten days.
De Milja kept his eyes down. Cheap leather briefcase in hand, felt hat with brim turned down, well-worn blue suit. A provincial lawyer, perhaps, snuffling out a living from feuding heirs and stubborn property owners and the tax indiscretions of petits commerçants. He walked for a long time, toward the edge of town. No more Germans. Sidewalks that narrowed, then vanished. Old women with string bags, a few cats. The neighborhood darkened—buildings crumbling softly into genteel poverty, a grocery store with a sign on the boarded window: fermé.
Finally, a confiserie—a candy shop, the miniature gold-foil packets of chocolates in the window covered with a layer of fine dust. A bell jangled above the door as he entered and a young girl stood to attention behind the counter. She was very plain, skin and hair the same washed-out color, and wore a tight sweater that was more hopeful than seductive. The smell of candied violets and burnt sugar was intense in the dark interior of the shop. It made de Milja feel slightly queasy.