"Let's start at once," Brandt said.
"Wait," said Christian. "I want to give this bicycle to someone else. Let someone else have a chance to get away…" He peered at the shadowy figures stirring around the town hall, trying to devise some innocent way of choosing the lucky man to survive.
"No." Brandt pulled Christian back towards him. "We can use the bicycle. The Frenchman at the farm will give us all the food we can carry for that bicycle."
Christian hesitated, but only for a second. "Of course," he said evenly. "What could I have been thinking of?"
With Brandt looking back nervously over his shoulder to make certain they were not being followed, and Christian wheeling the bicycle, they walked out of the town, back over the road Christian had traversed just half an hour before. At the first turning, where a dusty road slid out into the main highway between banks of flowering hawthorn bushes, fragrant and heavy in the still evening air, they turned off. After walking for a quarter of an hour, they reached the comfortable, geranium-bordered farmhouse and the large stone barn in which, under a pile of hay, Brandt had hidden the two-seater.
Brandt had been right about the bicycle. When, under the first stars of evening, they started out along the narrow road leading from the farmhouse, they had with them a ham, a large can of milk, half a large cheese, a litre of Calvados and two of cider, half a dozen thick loaves of coarse brown bread and a whole basketful of eggs that the farmer's wife had hard-boiled for them while they were taking the hay off the car. The bicycle had proved most useful.
With full stomach, relaxed behind the wheel of the small, humming, well-conditioned car, riding past the pale glow of the hawthorns into the main road in the moonlit evening, Christian smiled gently to himself. Meeting the boy in the blue shirt on the empty road early that morning, he reflected, had proved considerably more profitable than he had expected. They drove back through the town without stopping. Someone shouted at them as they sped through the square, but whether it was a command to halt or an appeal for a ride or a curse because they were going too fast and were endangering the men on foot, they never found out, because Christian accelerated as much as he dared. A moment later, they were sliding out on the dim ribbon of road that stretched ahead of them across the moonlit countryside towards the city of Paris two hundred kilometres away.
"Germany is finished," Brandt was saying, his voice thin and weary, but loud, so as to be heard against the rush of night wind that piled across the open car. "Only a lunatic wouldn't know it. Look at what's happening. Collapse. Nobody cares. A million men left to shift for themselves. A million men, practically without officers, without food, plans, ammunition, left to be picked up by the enemy when they have time. Or massacred, if they're foolish enough to make a stand. Germany can't support an army any longer. Perhaps, somewhere, they'll collect some troops and draw a line, but it will only be a gesture. A temporary, bloodthirsty gesture. A sick, romantic Viking funeral. Clausewitz and Wagner, the General Staff and Siegfried, combined for a graveyard theatrical effect. I'm as much of a patriot as the next man, and God knows, I've served Germany in the best way I knew, in Italy, in Russia, here in France… But I'm too civilized for what they're doing to us now. I don't believe in the Vikings. I'm not interested in burning on Goebbels's pyre. The difference between a civilized human being and a wild beast is that a human being knows when he is lost, and takes steps to save himself… Listen, when it looked as though the war was about to start, I had my application in to become a citizen of the French Republic, but I gave it up. Germany needed me," Brandt went on, earnestly, convincing himself as much as the man in the seat beside him of his honesty, his rectitude, his good sense, "and I offered myself. I did what I could. God, the pictures I've taken. And what I've gone through to get them! But there are no more pictures to be taken. Nobody to print them, nobody to believe them, or be touched by them if they are printed. I exchanged my camera with that farmer back there for ten litres of petrol. The war is no longer a subject for photographers because there is no war left to photograph. Only the mopping-up process. Leave that to the enemy photographers. It is ridiculous for the people who are being mopped up to record the process on film. Nobody can expect it of them. When a soldier joins an army, any army, there is a kind of basic contract the army makes with him. The contract is that while the army may ask him to die, it will not knowingly ask him to throw his life away. Unless the government is asking for peace this minute, and there are no signs that that is happening, they are violating that contract with me, and with every other soldier in France. We don't owe them anything. Not a thing."
"What are you telling me all this for?" Christian asked, keeping his eyes on the pale road ahead of him, thinking warily: He has a plan, but I will not commit myself to him yet.
"Because when I get to Paris," Brandt said slowly, "I am going to desert."
They drove in silence for a full minute.
"It is not the correct way to put it," said Brandt. "It is not I who am deserting. It is the Army which has deserted me. I intend to make it official."
Desert. The word trembled in Christian's ear. The enemy had dropped leaflets and safe-conducts on him, urging him to desert, telling him, long before this, that the war was lost, that he would be treated well… There were stories of men who had been caught by the Army in the attempt, hung to trees in batches of six, whose families in Germany had been shot… Brandt had no family, and was a freer agent than most. Of course, in confusion like this, who would know who had deserted, who had died, who had been captured while fighting heroically? A long time later, perhaps in 1960, perhaps never, some rumour might come out, but it was impossible to worry about that now.
"Why do you have to go to Paris to desert?" Christian asked, remembering the leaflets. "Why don't you go the other way and find the first American unit and give yourself up?"
"I thought of that," Brandt said. "Don't think I didn't. But it's too dangerous. Troops in the field aren't dependable. They may be hot-headed, perhaps one of their comrades was killed twenty minutes before by a sniper, perhaps they're in a hurry, perhaps they are Jews with relatives in Buchenwald, how can you tell? And then, in the country like this, there'd be a good chance you'd never reach the Americans or the English. Every damned Frenchman between here and Cherbourg has a gun by now, and is out to kill a German before it's too late. Oh, no. I want to desert, not die, my friend."
A thoughtful man, Christian thought admiringly, a man who has thought things out reasonably in advance. It was no wonder Brandt had done well in the Army, had taken just the kind of pictures he knew would be liked by the Propaganda Ministry, had got the fat job in Paris on the magazine, had been billeted for so long in an apartment in Paris and had done himself well.
"You remember my friend, Simone?" Brandt said.
"Are you still connected with her?" Christian asked, surprised. Brandt had been living with Simone as far back as 1940. Christian had met her with Brandt on his first leave in Paris. They had gone out together and Simone had even brought along a friend – what was her name? – Francoise, but Francoise had been as cold as ice, and had made no bones about the fact that she was not fond of Germans. Brandt had been lucky in this war. Dressed in the uniform of the conquering army, but almost a citizen of France, speaking French so well, he had made the best of the two possible worlds.
"Of course I'm still connected with Simone," Brandt said.
"Why not?"
"I don't know," Christian smiled. "Don't get angry. It's just that it's been so long… four years… in a war…" Somehow, although Simone had been very pretty, Christian had always imagined Brandt, with all his opportunities, as moving on from one dazzling woman to another through the years.