Night Soldiers

His had been, he knew, a classic descent. He had braced his mind early on, willed himself to meet imprisonment as he had met other events in his life. “A man can survive anything.” He did not know where he’d heard it but he believed it, believed in it, a religion of endurance. Thus he had taken his formless days and nights and imposed on them a rigid system of obligations. Exercise-physical strength can forestall psychological collapse, a universal and timeless prisoner’s axiom. Use the mind. He created a private algebra of propositions and wrestled with their solutions, mining his past life for usable circumstance: How long would it take for a man carrying his own food and water to walk in a straight line from Vidin to Sofia? From mental images of maps he contrived a route, crossing roads, streams and mountains, estimated the weight of water and food, determined the point of efficiency that lay somewhere between thirst and starvation and exertion of strength: the goal of the exercise was to arrive at the outskirts of Sofia carrying no provisions, crawling the final hundred feet.

Keep a diary. They would give him no paper, so he used the surfaces of opened-up matchboxes he bought from the prison store with his meager stipend, and kept records in pin-scratched hieroglyphs-a plus or minus sign, for instance, indicated success or failure in the two-hour mental exercise period for that day. Control is everything. He permitted himself only one hour a day for daydreaming, which was always erotic, violently colored, tones and textures scrupulously perfected by his imagination. Retain any connection at all with the world. Every moment of his time in the exercise yard he spent talking with other prisoners. Dede the pimp from Montparnasse. Kreuse the wife-murderer from Strasbourg. He did not care who they were or what they said-to connect, that was what mattered. Read. Religious tract or boys’ adventure, he sucked them dry of whatever particle of entertainment they could provide. Regret will kill you. A concept he embraced to a point where any thought that presented itself for contemplation had to be inspected for traces of hidden anger or sorrow before he would allow his mind to pursue it.

For the first year, as 1937 faded into 1938, the regime worked. He did not think of the future, he did not think of freedom, and achieved a level of self-discipline he had never imagined possible. But time-hours that became days that became months-was a killer of extraordinary stealth, and his spirit slowly failed him. He began to die. He watched it with slow horror, as a man will observe an illness that consumes his life. He would come to himself suddenly and realize that his mind had been on a journey into a violent universe of shimmering colors and bizarre shapes. He understood what was happening to him, but his understanding counted for nothing. Without the daily texture of existence to occupy it, he learned, the human soul wavers, wanders, begins to feed upon itself, and, in time, disintegrates. He saw them in the exercise yard, the clear-eyed, the ones who had died inside themselves. Thus, at last, he came upon the prisoner’s timeless and universal conclusion: there is nothing worse than prison.

From the gossip in the exercise yard, he knew that Wehrmacht columns were approaching Paris and that the country would fall in a matter of days. In shame, he prayed for this to happen. Bulgaria had joined Germany, Italy, Hungary and Romania in an alliance against Western Europe. He was, no matter the Stateless Person designation of the Nansen Commission, a Bulgarian national, thus nominally an ally of the Germans. When they took Paris, he would send them a message and offer his services. Initially, he would make his approach as Petrov, the former waiter, imprisoned for striking a blow against the Bolshevists. They would approve of that, he knew, despite their treaty of convenience with Stalin, and would more than likely accept him on that basis. If, perchance, they knew who he really was, he would brazen it out. Yes, he had fought them in Spain. But witness, Herr Oberst, this change of heart. Witness this attack on the NKVD itself-could they doubt his sincerity after that? He marveled at how the past could be refigured to suit the present, at how fragile reality truly was when you started to twist it.

Once he was out of prison, he would return to Spain, a neutral country, by deceit-a notional mission, perhaps, that he would lead them into assigning him-or by underground means: the mountains or the sea. He thought of the little towns hidden back in the hills, with too many young women who could not find a husband after the slaughter of the civil war. They would not look too closely at him, he was sure, if he worked hard. That was how they measured people down there and to that-if the blessed day ever came-he was more than equal.

But, on the night of June 12, everything changed.

At dusk, the mashed lentils and the gritty bread were shoved through the Judas port and his “quarter” filled up with drinking water. Between the mound of lentils and the tin plate lay a slip of paper.

In roman letters it said BF 825. Then the numerals 2:30.

The shock of it nearly knocked him to the floor.

For the intervening hours he dared not sit down, pacing the small cell and hurling his body about as he pivoted at the far wall. Then the door whispered open to reveal a man in black who stood in the shadowed corridor and waited to enter. Two words, spoken quietly, came from the darkness: “Khristo Stoianev?”

“Yes,” he answered.

The man stepped forward. He was a priest. Not the prison chaplain, a fat Gascon with a wine-reddened face, but a thin, ageless man with paperlike skin whose hands hung motionless at his sides.

“Is there anything here you will want?”

He grabbed his matches, a few shreds of tobacco folded in paper, his two letters and the matchbox diaries. He had nothing else.

“Let us go,” the priest said.

Together they walked through the darkened corridors, past the night sounds of imprisoned men. There were no guards to be seen. All the doors that would have normally blocked their path were ajar. In the reception area, a long wooden drawer sat at the center of a rough table. He found his old clothing and all the things that had been in his pockets on the day of his arrest. Also, a thick packet of ten-franc notes.

The priest took him to the front entry of the prison, then pushed at the grilled door set into one of the tall gates. The iron hinges grated briefly as it swung wide. For a moment, the city beyond the prison overwhelmed him with the sounds and smells of ordinary life and, for that instant freedom itself was palpable, as though he could touch it and see it and capture it in his hands. Then his eyes filled with tears and he saw the world in a blur.

“Blagodarya ti, Otche.” He needed, in that moment, to speak the words in his own language. Then added, in French, “It means ‘thank-you, Father.’ “

The priest closed his eyes and nodded, as though to himself. “Go with God,” he said, as Khristo walked through the door.

In the autumn of 1943, on a cold October night with a quarter moon, Lieutenant Robert F. Eidenbaugh parachuted into the Vosges mountains of southeastern France.

He landed in a field north of Epinal, breaking the big toe of his left foot-by doubling it over against the ground when he landed with his foot in the wrong position-and splitting the skin of his left index finger from tip to palm-he had no idea how. Limping, he chased down the wind-blown chute, wrestled free of the harness straps, and paused to listen to the fading drone of the Lancaster that circled the field, then turned west toward the OSS airbase at Croydon. From a sheath strapped to his ankle he took a broad-bladed knife and began digging at the ground in order to bury the chute. Fifteen minutes later, sweat cooling in the mountain chill, he was still hard at it. This was not the same turf he had encountered in practice burials at the old CCC–Civilian Conservation Corps-camp in Triangle, Virginia, a few miles east of Manassas, where he had trained. This grass was tough and rooty and anchored well below the surface of the ground. At last he abandoned the knife and began ripping up large sods with his hands- holding his split index finger away from the work-until he’d exposed a jagged oval of dark soil. Next he gathered up the silk and shrouds of the parachute, forced the bulk into a shallow depression, and covered it with a thin layer of dirt. He laid the sods back over the dirt and stamped them into place, then walked away a few feet to see what it looked like. It looked like someone had just buried a parachute.

Typically, there would have been a reception committee on the ground and their leader would have bestowed the chute-the silk was immensely valuable-on one of his men, a spoil of war bestowed for bravery in a tradition as old as the world. But this was a “cold” drop. There were no maquisards triangulating the drop zone with bonfires, there was no container of Sten guns and ammunition dropped along with him-to be carried away by men and women on bicycles-and he had no radio. The mission, code-named KIT FOX, called for him to contact a loosely organized group of French resistance fighters in the village of Cambras, direct their sabotage efforts, turn them into a true reseau-headquarters-for underground operations, and extend, if possible, a courrier-secret mail system-throughout that part of the Vosges. His contact for supply was code-named ULYSSE (after the Homeric hero Ulysses), a senior officer of the