Kid Comes Back (4 page)

The owner of the house was called Lucien Jacques. Whether that was his real name or his name in the Resistance, they never discovered. He was not called Monsieur Jacques, or Lucien, but always Lucien Jacques. He was an instructor or teacher in the local school, a tallish man, half bald, thin like everyone they met, with a queer, gray-colored face. His wife, small, active, also gray-faced and thin, cooked meals for all four men from the tiny rations at her disposal, made a somewhat unappetizing soup and baked strange-looking bread. Occasionally also there was a tasteless vegetable called rutabaga, almost too tough to eat. During their stay of several weeks they did not look forward to meals in the home of Lucien Jacques.

During that time, however, they learned through their hosts, and thanks to Marcel’s growing knowledge of English, something about the Resistance. Outside France, in the American Army, everyone talked about the Underground. Inside France, as they soon discovered, it was called the Resistance. One is in the Resistance, one makes the Resistance, one is a Resister. There were, in the Resistance, two kinds of people—the hard and the soft. That is, those who were tough and those who weren’t. The
Maquis
, the men who lived in the country, those they had met in the inn the night of their crash, who remained in the hills and forests of the Dordogne, fighting the Germans whenever and wherever they could, were the pure Resistance. Then there were the “legal ones,” people like Lucien Jacques and his wife, who were apparently ordinary civilians, yet were working all the time in the Resistance at home.

They would have to wait in Floreac, they learned, for word from headquarters of the Department to start them on their journey to the coast. The business of escaping from France was not, apparently, as easy once you were inside the country as it had seemed when being briefed in the Operations Tent before a night mission. Many other downed airmen, and many French Resisters, were anxious to get out also, and everyone had to wait his turn. A message, they found, would be sent when their turn arrived. Messages as a rule were unwritten; if written, they were placed in cigarette papers so they could be swallowed if necessary. Sometimes they were carried in bicycle tires or the lining of a man’s necktie. Occasionally the messengers were women, and they heard of women who journeyed for miles by bicycle in mid-winter storms with messages. These messages were delivered to a friendly house in each town called a letter box. When discovered by the Germans, the people in the house were promptly shot, and the property burned to the ground. The letter box was then said to have been destroyed, and a new one had to be set up. This often meant a delay of several weeks.

A dozen, a hundred times a day during their sojourn in Floreac, Roy wished he had studied French at school, or at least tried to learn some words and phrases in the long months in North Africa and Corsica. Often he listened to conversations between Jim and Marcel, conducted partly in bad French, partly in bad English. Lucien Jacques and his wife frequently came up at night to join them. Slowly Roy realized what it was, this Resistance. And these Resisters. He learned of the children in school, so underfed that if sent to the blackboard they could not stand. These people, these pale, undernourished folk, did not look at all like heroes, but they were heroes. They risked their lives all day every day, they and thousands all over France.

There was Marcel’s sister who thought it was fun to stand on the platforms of buses in Bordeaux and slip anti-German pamphlets in the pockets of enemy officers. Or his friend, the telephone clerk in Lyon, who went out regularly after curfew when it was death to be caught by a German patrol, to cut wires. Or the local postmaster, a wounded war veteran, who invariably managed to get his crutches entangled with officers’ legs in the cafés; or the nephew of Lucien Jacques, a farm boy of twelve, who gave an armored column the wrong directions and sent them forty miles out of their way in the dark. Then there was the butcher in Floreac who had an argument with a German, lost his temper, and ended up by throwing the man into his refrigerator. No traces of the soldier were ever found, though everyone in town knew perfectly well what had happened.

Occasionally they got a small sheet of flimsy tissue paper, one of the Resistance newspapers called
Combat
, or
Libération.
Then Marcel would lie on his back translating the news laboriously. Through one of these sheets they learned that IT was approaching. IT was the landing, the famous landing, the landing promised the French for three years, and so long deferred, so long awaited, the moment for which the French, so many times deceived, hardly dared hope. One night, when they were listening to the radio which Marcel had carried along, with Madame Lucien Jacques at the window watching for German patrols in the street, a message came that sent the three French into ecstasy.

They suddenly jumped, half-shouting, talking excitedly together, all of them. Lucien Jacques immediately disappeared down the trap door to the ground floor. For some time the Americans were unable to understand what had happened. Then it became clear. The message had come from the B.B.C. in London, the message all France had waited for so many years.

Only six words. “The fairy has a lovely smile.” Yet to the men and women of the Resistance it meant everything. Hold yourself in readiness; IT is at hand. Invasion! Release! Freedom is near. Lucien Jacques soon appeared at the trap door of the attic with a bottle and glasses in his hands. He held out the glasses to Marcel. That night the three French and the two Americans drank the last bottle of champagne left in the house.

They were cheered, all of them, knowing that deliverance was close. Roy, especially, felt happy. The pain in his leg and thigh was less severe. As the doctor predicted, the rest had helped. The pain returned sometimes, as when he knelt too long at the window watching for German patrols; but day by day it lessened. Soon he felt able to take whatever might come. Finally, late one evening, word arrived. They were to be ready to leave town the next day, traveling nearer the coast, mostly by small, local trains. Boarding an express meant more controls, more inspections, more danger.

Jim became Dennis Dupont,
cultivateur
or farm hand from Plessis, near Floreac. Roy was Georges Barraux, his cousin, a
vigneron
or wine grower from the region. They were journeying to the town of Dax to work for the summer with relatives. Identity cards, with their own pictures in French civilian clothes and stamped by a seal stolen from the German
Komandateur
of the town, were in order. Everything was fixed for the getaway.

Saying good-by to Madame Lucien Jacques, they left about ten the next morning. Out the back gate, down the alley, along rear streets to the station. Marcel carried an antique pasteboard suitcase that seemed to be falling apart. Walking along, they discovered that the radio was in the suitcase. It was one that had been brought in by Fried Spratt, and it was to be delivered at their next stop to someone in the Resistance. Looking down at the feeble suitcase, its handle tied with string, an old shirt sticking from a hole in one corner, Jim wondered how Marcel dared to carry it. He asked him about it.

“In the Resistance, is dangerous everytheeng. To sleep, to eat, to live is dangerous. Wan day my sees-ter in train puts valise with Resistance journals up... so... above. It breaks, the valise. Down come journals, dozens and dozens.”

“What happened, Marcel?”

“Nawtheeng. The people in train, they know; they peeck up journals and put back.”

The two boys looked at each other, trusting no such occurrence would happen on their trip. Now they were nearing the
Place de la Gare.
There was the station, with its stopped clock which said five minutes to six. A German soldier, his bayonet on his rifle, stood at the entrance. They brushed his sleeve as they passed within. The waiting room was completely jammed, and a long line stood at the tiny ticket window. People were milling round with bundles, baggage, boxes, clothes tied up in sheets, and one woman even had a live hen, its feet fastened by a string, in a patent leather shopping bag. Both the hen and the bag looked the worse for wear. Finally Marcel got their tickets and came toward them, perspiring visibly. At the train gate, the blue-coated railwayman with the German officer beside him punched their tickets and inspected their identity cards carefully. Then he shoved them through and onto the platform.

Like the waiting room, the platform was a madhouse. Hundreds of expectant travelers stood in the space for a third that number. When the train arrived, an hour late, there was a terrific battle to get aboard. Marcel fought his way in, and they followed. Unlike our trains, each car was divided into little compartments running across the carriage, seating five on a side. The benches were of wood, hard and uncomfortable, especially when twelve people were jammed into the space for ten.

The train stayed forever in the station, but finally, giving a shriek, it pulled slowly away, leaving many would-be passengers stranded frantically on the platform. They moved through a warm, sunny countryside, a land of white stone houses with red roofs, many grapevines, farms with every inch of land cultivated. The tiny train, already overloaded, stopped at each station along the line, frequently unsnarling a few weary passengers and invariably taking on many more, who jammed themselves somehow into the corridor that was filled with baggage and people standing up or sitting on their suitcases. At about two in the afternoon, they reached a main junction where they had to change for the trip to Dax, their destination. Unfortunately here it was necessary to take an express.

Since they did not wish to pass the gate into the station and have their identity cards checked again by German sentries, they sat down on the stone platform to wait. Madame Lucien Jacques had given them a lunch of tough meat sandwiches and a bottle of wine. It was steaming hot, and they longed for water, but discovered that the water from the fountain at one end of the platform was not drinkable. The express was late, and it was nearly four in the afternoon before it thundered into the station. The coaches were completely full, and they were immediately assaulted by the same furious crowd of baggage-laden travelers. This time only Roy managed to get a tiny space in a compartment, while Jim and Marcel had to squeeze with a dozen others into the long corridor that ran down one side of the car.

Ten minutes after leaving, the French police came past. Roy felt perspiration on his forehead as a gendarme in the corridor touched his cap with one finger and leaned into the compartment. Another policeman checked the standees outside. The man at the door glanced hard at Roy, but returned his identity card without a word. Then he spoke to Marcel by the window in the passageway. His tones were low, yet excited. Marcel, in turn, immediately began whispering to Jim.

Something’s about to break, Roy thought. If only I could understand what’s going on!

The whole compartment was interested now; the two soldiers beside him with their guns between their feet; the old man with the waxed mustachios; the ancient lady at the window, with the voluminous skirts and the black velvet band round her neck; the worker with the beret; the young girl with the wicker basket on her knees, all of them. They understood what Roy did not.

Then Jim leaned over him into the compartment. “Gestapo! The Germans are following down the car below to check on the French police. They’ll want your identity card. Whatever happens, don’t talk.”

Suddenly the ancient lady in the far corner leaned toward Roy across the seats.

“Vous!”
She was pointing at him. “
Vous!
Spik French?”

Roy had been told by the Intelligence Officer at the base a dozen times that if brought down in France he was to obey the orders of the Resistance. The orders of the Resistance came through Marcel, and they were that he was not to talk. So he did not talk. He simply shook his head.

Instantly the old lady began to make weird motions. She beckoned to him, she spread out her skirts, while the soldier next to him seized his arm and pointed toward her. Roy neither understood what they wanted nor what he should do. Then there was a scream, a horrible scream far down the car, a scream that rose above the noise and the jolting of the train; a woman’s cry, tragic and lonely.

The whole compartment sat tense, listening. Then Roy was pulled and hauled over their feet toward the old lady beside the window. She motioned to him to get down, put her hand on his shoulder and yanked him to the floor. Extending her skirts, she enveloped him completely. From the young girl next to her she grabbed the wicker basket and placed it in her lap, just above Roy’s head.

From the corridor outside came the sounds of a scuffle, harsh German tones, and the sobbing of a French woman as she was led from the car. Next Roy heard a sharp, short command in a guttural voice, and he could guess that they were all handing over their identity cards. The old lady’s hand was on his shoulder, steadying him, patting his arm gently. He knelt there, desperately uncomfortable, his knees sore, his head hurting where the old lady pressed the wicker basket into his neck. The pain in his leg became acute again. His whole hip began to ache intolerably; it seemed impossible to stand his cramped position any longer. Then finally the harsh German voice moved to the next compartment.

The old lady waited a minute, moved the wicker basket off his head, lifted her skirts, and Roy climbed out, red of face, clenching his teeth as the pain stabbed up and down his leg. He squeezed into his seat at the other end of the compartment. No one said a word. The old lady was looking out the window.

For perhaps half an hour the train jolted along on a most uneven track. Jim leaned against the window of the corridor, but Marcel was not in sight. At last he appeared, smiling, hot and perspiring. Instantly Roy understood. The French police knew Marcel would be picked up by the German control that followed them along the corridor of the train, so they had hidden him somewhere until the inspection was finished.