Under a War-Torn Sky (24 page)
Read Under a War-Torn Sky Online
Authors: L.M. Elliott
“
Qu'est-ce que vous voulez que je fasse avec lui?
” Her friend asked gruffly what she expected him to do with Henry.
Henry felt more and more like a mangy alley cat no one wanted.
The girl bristled and answered curtly that she didn't expect any favours from him. She was taking the American to the nuns. They could figure it out.
The young
maquisard
laughed and joked that the nuns would see how well he said his prayers before deciding his fate. Then he took her hand and kissed it, telling her to be careful.
One of the leader's companions grabbed his elbow and said, “
Si elle va à Vézelay elle pourrait apporter les trucs de radio à Bernard.
”
The girl's friend frowned and shrugged off his subordinate. The companion had wanted the girl to carry radio parts to a man named Bernard. Her friend didn't like the idea at all.
“
Elle passera presque sur les lieux du massacre et trop proche des Allemands à Château-Chinon. Non.
” He turned to the girl and told her again to go hide with the nuns.
Henry gladly turned to leave, relieved to be away from men who knew his shame, relieved to be avoiding a town the
maquisard
said had a German garrison in it. But the girl didn't budge. She wanted to take on the mission.
She spoke in a tumble of words, telling him she'd carried parts before tucked in her umbrella and bicycle basket.
“
Pas cette fois-ci, mon enfant,
” the young man answered. “
C'est trop dangereux en ce moment.
”
The girl turned red. Her boyfriend had called her a child. Lord, Henry could only imagine what Patsy would do to him, if he ever called her that.
The girl swung back to slap the
maquisard
. He grabbed her hand and grinned. She only proved his point, he said. She acted like a child.
He let go of her arm and marched himself and his team away down the hill, over the next, and then they were gone.
The girl stood seething, breathing hard until they disappeared. She whirled on her heel and ran, skirt and hair flying. Henry started after her.
“Wait!” he cried. In his sad shape, he'd never keep up.
She didn't.
Henry struggled after her, calling again, just when he knew he was going to faint or vomit.
Finally, she halted. Her fists clenched by her side, she stormed back to Henry. He was bent over, breathing like a horse about to die.
“
Vite.
Do you understand? I have to be rid of you so that I can fight
les Boches.
I want to kill as many as I can.”
Henry straightened up, panting between words. “No, you don't. It won't make you feel as good as you think it will.”
“And how would you know, thief?”
“Look, I'm not proud of what I've done to survive. But I've seen a lot of things you haven't.”
The girl narrowed her eyes and slid up close to him. “I saw my mother killed because she would not let a convoy of drunk Germans into our home. They shot her dead, then they ran into the house. One of them finished the meal she was eating just before. When they left they took everything â the pigs, the cows, the silver. Everything except my hens and my fruit trees. Last month, in Dun-les-Places, the Nazis said we shot at them from the church tower. They hanged the priest from that tower. Then a Gestapo informant pointed out people who helped the
maquis.
The collaborator grew up with those people, ate supper with them, worshipped God with them. The Nazis shot them all â thirty people â in front of the church. My eighty-year-old uncle was one of them. I went to Dun-les-Places to find my aunt and bring her home to live with me. Their blood is still on the church walls.
“I have seen all this. Last month, I am seventeen. I will kill every Nazi I find and every collaborator. And I will smile when I do it.”
An awful silence hung between them. Henry couldn't take his eyes off those furious yellow-green ones. He was horrified by what she reported, by what she planned. He wanted to run far away from her fury and at the same time he wanted to hold and comfort her. His confusion kept him immobilized, wordless, arms by his side.
Then they heard gunshots.
The girl's eyes darted to the horizon behind Henry. “
Mon Dieu. André.
”
She brushed by Henry and ran, ran again with skirt and hair flying. This time Henry managed to keep pace.
They came to the top of a hill and could see a jeep flying up the road, pursued by two brown-and-black camouflaged trucks and four German motorcycles. A heap of men clung to the open back of the jeep, some firing back towards the Nazis. Their aim was terrible because of the wild jolting of the jeep. The Germans were closing in fast.
Just then three small figures rose up out of the grasses.
“
André!
” the girl screamed.
BOOM!
The first German truck exploded into flames and careened off the road. André's group must have thrown grenades into it. The second truck screeched to a stop. A dozen soldiers jumped out and opened fire into the wheat field. The
maquis
jeep turned left, roared into the field across the road, looped back and tried to mow down the Germans caught in the crossfire between them and André in the wheat field.
The girl began to run.
This is suicide, Henry warned himself. But he ran after her, watching the skirmish unfold before him.
German soldiers screamed, fell, and writhed on the ground.
Frenchmen screamed, fell off the moving jeep, and slammed down dead on the roadway.
A dozen yards from the fighting, Henry caught up to the girl. He tackled her to the ground. “Crawl,” he whispered.
They shimmied through the grasses to the first of André's companions. He was dead. “
Non, non, non,
” cried the girl. She thrashed on.
Henry paused over the dead
maquisard
. No beard on his face. Another teenager robbed of the chance to live his life.
Henry picked up the boy's gun. As he yanked it up, the dead boy's hand fell limply from the trigger to his belt. It bumped against a grenade.
Henry's heart hammered against his chest. A grenade. He'd never used one. Pull the pin and throw, right? That's all there was to it. Henry glanced back up to the fight. The French were definitely outnumbered. The jeep doggedly kept circling the German truck and the soldiers huddled beside it, but one after another the
maquis
fighters were being gunned down. Soon the jeep would be empty of French fighters. A grenade that found the right mark might save them.
Henry no longer needed his father's voice to prod him in life-or-death circumstances. He picked up the grenade. It was heavy, cold, scaly. It felt like a thing of death. Henry pulled the pin, stood up, and hurled it.
BOOM!
The explosion knocked Henry back and over. His head hit the ground hard and the world went black.
Henry surfaced to consciousness to the sound of sobbing and gunshots. He sat up, woozy, but on the alert. A
maquisard
was shooting at a pair of German soldiers running away through the fields. He missed his mark and turned, cursing himself.
When the fighter noticed Henry, he strode towards him, gun in hand.
“No!” shouted Henry, scrambling backwards like a crab.
The Frenchman halted, shoved the pistol into his belt, and put his hands up reassuringly. He pointed to Henry, to the smouldering truck, and back to Henry. With a bow, he said, “
Merci.
”
Henry nodded and replied, “
Je vous en prie.
” He rubbed the back of his aching head and watched the four
maquisards
who had survived loading the jeep with their dead and wounded.
Where was the girl? He could hear her heartbroken crying somewhere in the wheat. André must have died. Henry ground his teeth. If only he'd run faster, thrown the grenade faster, maybe the young man would still be alive. He forced himself to get up to find her.
The girl was deep in the golden wheat. She clutched André's body, rocking the two of them back and forth, her face pressed to his, cheek to cheek. In whispers she asked him to wake up, to look at her. “
Tu dois te réveiller maintenant. S'il te plaît, André.
” She gently picked up his hand and kissed it. “
S'il te plaît, mon amour. Réveille-toi maintenant.
”
Embarrassed, Henry looked away from the intimacy of the embrace. They had obviously held each other like that in happy, twilight moments, moments they had promised each other their futures.
Henry stood and waited.
The
maquis
leader quietly joined him. After a few moments, he told the girl that they must take André's body.
The girl ignored him.
“
Nous ne pouvons pas rester ici.
” The man grew more insistent. They could not remain on the open road. The two soldiers who escaped would report their position soon enough. They had to move on immediately. He would bury André for her with his comrades.
The girl still ignored him.
The man motioned for his fighters to separate her from her love's corpse.
Wild with grief, the frail, seventeen-year-old girl turned on them with a viciousness that startled the muscled men to a halt. “
Non! Ne me touchez pas!
” She picked up André's gun and turned it on them, threatening to kill them if they dared touch his body. “
Si vous le touchez, je vous tue!
”
Henry could tell the
maquis
were losing patience. Soon they would tackle her, perhaps hurt her without meaning to. Maybe she would shoot one of them. Maybe they would shoot her. He took a step forward.
She swung the gun on him. “Get back, thief,” she snarled. “Thief!” Her hand shook uncontrollably. “Are you after his sweater, too? And him, not even cold yet.” She sobbed hysterically. But the gun remained aimed, wobbling dangerously.
Henry flushed hot. He had been degraded by Clayton's name-calling a thousand times. But not like this. This hit an awful truth. It had occurred to him to take one of the dead German's shirts or a pair of new, soft boots. He had become a scavenger, as loathsome as turkey buzzards picking at roadkill back home.
He took a deep breath. Maybe if he could help her, he might redeem himself.
“Claudette, give me the gun. Let them take André. They will give him a hero's burial. I will take you with them so that you can see it. And then I will make sure you get home safe, to your aunt. I owe you that. I promise.
Tu comprends?
”
In the corner of his eye, Henry could see the
maquis
closing in behind her as she concentrated on him, on gunning him down.
She shook her head vehemently. “Thief,” she shrieked. She squeezed the trigger.
Henry gasped, expecting to explode inside.
Click.
Click.
Click, click, click.
The gun was empty.
The men grabbed the girl.
Henry sat in the back of the jeep crammed between two injured men and a pile of dead bodies. He forced himself to stare at the wheat rushing past him, not the mangled corpses. Claudette sat with her back against his. She trembled with silent sobs.
They were heading towards a chain of dark mountains, rippling low on the horizon, reminding Henry of the Virginia Blue Ridge near Charlottesville. He thought of home and of his mother, Lilly. She'd know what to do for Claudette, thought Henry. His mother had been able to comfort everyone. Henry stole a glance at the girl. No, he had no idea how to soothe someone this cut open by grief and so many tragedies.
The man riding in the passenger seat, the one who seemed to be the group's leader, turned to ask Henry about himself.
Henry answered that he was an American pilot. The man nodded and then spoke quickly to the driver. The driver shrugged. “
Oui. On peut le garder. Sait-il peut-être réparer la voiture?
”
Claudette was asked to translate. She snapped out of her sorrow to refuse angrily. She told the Frenchman she was tired of speaking to a thief.
Henry spoke for himself. He had caught enough of the front seat conversation to understand that this
maquis
group did not run an escape line and that the driver had said something about a car that needed repair. Henry told the leader he didn't want to be any more trouble. But if the group had a car engine that needed fixing, he might be able to do that in exchange for dinner. His father was an ace mechanic. He knew a few things.
The Frenchman grunted and nodded. They rode the rest of the way in silence, climbing the black mountain range along narrow dirt roads. Henry clung to the jeep's edge as it jolted through the dense, forested hills. More than once he had to catch a corpse as it began to slide off the back. The wounded men groaned.
Finally, when the moon was high, the jeep plunged down a narrow path. Henry had to duck to avoid being cracked in the skull by the branches that twined themselves into a tangled thicket overhead. To him it looked like a matted, eerie dead-end, but then brakes screeched and the jeep skidded into a camp.
Like the camp in the Vercors, this one teemed with an odd assortment of boys, men, and even women carrying mostly German guns. Some wore bits and pieces of Nazi uniforms, the luckier ones replacing their wooden clogs with German field boots. Despite their hodgepodge of clothing the camp was tidy and regimented. Wooden walkways made of tree branches lashed together kept the fighters out of the dank mud. They crisscrossed the camp connecting the tents made from parachutes. A dozen bicycles ringed a large beech tree in the centre of camp.
Henry was led to a table built in the same fashion as the walkways and given a thick potato soup to eat. He practically drooled at the savoury smell. Claudette sat across from him and ate nothing. It took all the will-power Henry had not to grab her bowl.
A tall lanky man wearing a tweed coat and tie sat down next to Henry, and handed him a cup with a few spoonfuls of golden liquid in it. “
Salut,
” said the man, clinking his glass against Henry's.
Henry gulped it as the Frenchman did. The liquid burned all the way down his throat to the pit of his stomach. He coughed. The man smiled in a friendly way.
“A good cognac, yes? My last bottle. I was a lawyer before the war and could afford such things. Now,” he sighed and gestured to the forest. “We must live as Robin Hood, yes? They tell me you saved the jeep. I thank you. The British dropped it just a few days ago. It would have been a shame to have lost it so quickly.”
“The British dropped a jeep?” asked Henry in surprise.
The man nodded. “And many other things. The jeep took four parachutes. It was beautiful coming down.”
He assessed Henry carefully before continuing. “You look as though you have been in our country awhile. I am sorry I cannot move you now. You must stay with us. We are busy fighting. The leader of the Free French army, Charles de Gaulle, finally broadcast the order for the
maquis
to rise up against the Nazis as an army. We are to disrupt the German troops as much as possible. We are to distract them with small ambushes as they retreat from the coast. We must break their telephone and telegraph lines to prevent them from communicating orders about counterinvasion tactics. This should slow their regrouping and keep them disorganized. The men you saved had just set a detonator on the railroad tracks to break the supply line to the German garrison in Autun. I am grateful to you for the men who lived. They are my best explosives men.”
Henry was amazed at the
maquisard
's candour. Perhaps because he was openly fighting the Nazis, the man didn't feel the need for secrecy. But Henry knew the openness reflected a do-or-die attitude. There was no middle ground. Even though he felt he was acting as part of De Gaulle's Free French army, the
maquisard
would not be treated as a soldier if caught. The Nazis would shoot him instantly as a terrorist.
The man stood up and extended his hand. “My name is Martin.”
Henry stood up. “Mine is Henry,
Henri
.” They shook hands. Henry's grasp lingered for a moment. Hesitantly he asked, “
Monsieur
, there was a lady, a very kind lady, who helped me. She is being held in Lyon. The Gestapo was transporting me there to testify against her when I escaped. Is there anything I can do to help her?”
Martin's face turned grim. “No, nothing. Her best hope is that the Allies retake France quickly.”
Then he addressed Claudette and told her his sorrow about André. He had been a good boy. “
Je regrette beaucoup André, chérie. C'était un bon garçon.
”
Claudette rose to go with Martin and bury her love. Henry followed. Atop a grassy hill, bathed in moonlight, a handful of people stood around five shallow graves. Henry could count at least ten other newly dug and filled trenches nearby.
The bodies with which Henry had ridden in the jeep were wrapped in parachutes. One by one they were gently lowered and covered with earth. Claudette sobbed as dirt hit André's body.
As the group turned to leave a sudden clap of thunder echoed through the mountains. Henry glanced up, but saw a clear canopy of stars, no clouds. He looked to the horizon. A fiery plume shot up in the valley below them.
Martin smiled. A passing train had ignited his
maquis
booby trap. Whatever had been in the train was no more.
The next morning, Henry looked for Claudette. He knew he was asking for more abuse from her, but he couldn't help it. There was something about her â something about her looks, something about her spirit â that ate at him. It went beyond his desire to prove himself respectable to a person who'd caught him at his lowest. That was a matter of trying to reclaim some smidgen of self-respect. This was something more.
He found her, predictably, in a hot argument. Martin had instructed one of his
maquisards
to escort her home. He wanted her to go back to work at the bakery so that she could continue to supply them with bread. She didn't want to. She wanted to stay and fight.
Henry watched at a safe distance as Claudette clenched her fists and shouted up at the still well-dressed Martin. Even though he towered over her in height, he seemed to recoil from the fury of the petite teenager.
What a spitfire, thought Henry. A slow smile spread on his face. The scene reminded him of the time Patsy had kicked that brat Jackson who had been picking on Henry in the schoolyard. That's what it was! Henry suddenly recognized what it was about Claudette that lured him, bothered him. She had spunk like Patsy's, but it was spunk turned unforgiving and vengeful. He could imagine what he loved about Patsy twisting the same dark way if she had to endure what this French girl had.
Martin was losing patience. He grabbed Claudette by the arm and pulled her to his waiting subordinate. The man took her the same way and starting dragging her out of the camp. Claudette sat down in the mud, kicking and screaming like a toddler having a tantrum. When the
maquisard
tried to continue dragging her along the ground, she tripped him up, so that they both sprawled and thrashed in the mud. The men observing laughed loudly. The
maquisard
jumped to his feet, humiliated, and shouted angrily at Claudette. He raised his hand as if to strike her.
Without knowing exactly why he did it, Henry stepped forward. “
Monsieur Martin?
Your men told me that one of your cars needed fixing. Maybe she can help me. See how small her hands are? My dad always needed me when our truck broke down 'cause he couldn't get his big hands all the way down in the gears to fix them. I bet I can use her hands.”
Everyone froze. Lord, what have I done now, thought Henry. But he walked over to Claudette and pulled her to her feet. “Yep, look at her fingers, long and thin. I bet she can be a real help,
Monsieur
.”
Martin laughed. “You do not know what you are getting yourself into, Henri. But I lost my mechanic two weeks ago, killed in town. If you can fix the car it would be very helpful. And if you want Claudette's company, you are welcome to her. I don't think my man would be able to drag her all the way back to St-Benin anyway. Come,” he gestured to the people surrounding them. “We have work to do. Claudette, show Henri the cars.” He held up his finger. “Be good.”
In frosty silence, Claudette led Henry out of camp, up a narrow road that ran through more knotted woods. Coppery beech trees grew up in many forks, more like massive, woody bushes. It would be nearly impossible to run quickly through them to hide from German troops, Henry noted.
After about ten minutes of uphill walking, Henry saw cars tucked into screens of briars along the roadway. There were a small Peugeot and a Citroën plus two stolen Nazi Mercedes. It was the larger Mercedes that didn't run. Henry could see why the
maquis
wanted that one fixed. Not only could they slip in and out of places masquerading as Germans in that car, they could probably stuff eight gunmen in it, easy.
