Night Soldiers

resistance and his one resource on the ground, based in the small city of Belfort, not far from Switzerland. His only direct line of communication with OSS was to be coded messages personnels from the foreign service of the BBC.

His true mission was, in fact, unknown to him.

He was not alone in the area. There were several British communication and sabotage nets nearby, but he had been briefed-twice, first at OSS headquarters in London, then at the MI6 center in Battersea, located at what had once been the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum for the Orphan Daughters of Soldiers and Sailors Killed in the Crimean War-to stay well away from them. Both American and British briefers had been emphatic on that point.

Which left Robert Eidenbaugh alone in a French field with a broken toe and a split finger. His hands were blackened with dried blood and French earth, and he was hobbling badly. A toe was almost a silly thing to hurt, but the pain made him grind his teeth on every step. He thought to bind up the finger with his handkerchief but decided against it. He disliked the idea of a white cloth flashing in the darkness as he moved about. He set off for Cambras- eight miles along a series of mountain ridges-on the narrow road a mile from the drop zone. His index finger throbbed and continued to ooze blood. How the hell had he done that? He leaned on a maple tree whose dry leaves rattled in the night breeze and took off his right shoe, then bound his sock around the finger, cutting off a piece of shoelace to secure the binding. He had, he realized with some horror, nearly removed his left shoe, which would have been an error because his toe had swollen so badly that he would never have been able to get the shoe back on. Limping, he held his zip-up briefcase under his right arm and moved through the darkness toward Cambras.

His hat, suit, tie, shirt, socks and underwear were all well worn, and all of French manufacture. The suit had been altered by a French tailor at the OSS clothing depot on Brook Street in London. His toilet articles were also French, and the pistol in his briefcase was Belgian-a Fabrique Nationale GP35 automatic, essentially a licensed 9 mm Browning with a thirteen-round magazine. He had been warned never to carry it in public during daylight hours. His cover name was Lucien Bruer, accented on the final syllable in the French manner, and he was supposedly the sales representative of a Belgian company selling agricultural implements and fertilizers. He had been born on the French island of Martinique, raised in Toulon, a bachelor. His documents were quite good, he’d been told, for examination by French police or German street patrols. Should he fall into the hands of an intelligence section- Gestapo or SD-however, that would be that. We’ve learned, they’d told him, that the sooner you run after capture, the better your chances of a successful escape.

He did not intend to be captured. He did not intend to mingle with Germans. He did not intend to be “brave”- had in fact been specifically cautioned against it. He would move cautiously in daylight, at most another French face in a French countryside, and play the game at night. A few wild souls back in Virginia had been eager to crawl about and slit throats. Their time would come, but for the moment they either trained their days away or disappeared back into regular service units.

For most of the night he walked alone on the road-barely two lanes wide, with no center line-built of whitish pebbled aggregate with ragged edges bordered by tall weeds. In some places it was frost-rippled from the previous winter; in others, the lush roadside growth had cracked the paving. He saw the brief silhouette of a hunting owl. Something whispered away from his shoe through the tall grass. Then, as the moon waned, he heard a distant engine and hobbled quickly to cover. He listened intently to the two-stroke sputter of the engine and decided it was a motorcycle. He was correct. Watched the German dispatch rider go by, sighting on him with a sockbound index finger and silently mouthing bam just at the proper moment, then heard the sound fade into the distance in a symphony of gear changes. No need to shift that much, he thought. The German, alone on the road, was playing with his machine, lying low over the handlebars like a racing driver. But he too, leading the rider for a single perfect shot, had been playing. That would change.

What caught his attention, however, in the reality of that first, nebulous contact with the enemy, was the intimacy of it. The meaning of his job now came to him in bold letters for the first time-what he was really going to do and how it would feel to do it. Professional soldiering he respected-where would the Allies be without a corps of trained officers? — but he could never be more than an imposter in that world, his personality was not made for uniforms. He had, in civilian life, competed in a world of commonplace weapons: typewriters, telephones, perceptions, insights. In that world he had neither won nor lost, but now the battle was rejoined, with the prize for winning or the cost of losing vastly increased.

The British, believing their social system and its exigencies prepared them for clandestine life, had their doubts about the ability of the American personality to adapt to a world where nothing was quite what it seemed. Were these blunt and forthright people capable of subtlety, deception, the artful ruse? Some thought not. But they had not lived and trained with Robert Eidenbaugh and his colleagues. They did not entirely understand that the dark side of the American personality was the adventurer’s side and that a time of war was the perfect climate for its flowering.

Maquis meant “brush,” and that was pretty much the story at Cambras. In first light he’d found the chipped stone mile marker on the inner curve of the road, heard, a few minutes later, the sound of a woodcutter at work in the forest-recognition signal number one-then saw a pile of cow dung, confirming the first signal, by a dirt path that wound up the mountainside to the village.

Cambras, backlit by a cold mountain sky, was a mud square surrounded by a handful of stone cottages with tightly shuttered windows and a rust-stained fountain with a tattered hen standing motionless atop the spigot, its feathers ruffled by the breeze. There were several small, brownish dogs, who glared at him unpleasantly from a safe distance, but no people. The village smelled like damp earth and pig manure. Eidenbaugh suddenly recalled a family outing to the mountains of the Var region, north of Toulon, where at lunchtime they had encountered just such a village. He could still see the look on his mother’s face as she’d said, “Not here, Arthur.”

The Cambras maquis trickled from the doors of the cottages and formed up, more or less, in the square. There was a period of awkward silence, then they began to introduce themselves. There were the Vau brothers, both tall and hulking with spiky blond hair, clearly the village bullies and, he thought, a little slow. Henri Veul, called Sable-Sandy-watchful and silent, a shotgun slung, barrel down, diagonally across his back. La Brebis-the ewe-in fact Marie Bonet, a stocky, young woman whose broad forehead and tiny eyes suggested the face of a sheep. And Vigie, which meant “lookout man,” the youngest, perhaps sixteen. The Vau brothers, he thought, were no more than nineteen.

“Lucien?” It was Alceste Vau, the senior brother, who spoke.

“Oui,” he said.

He hadn’t any idea what they’d expected, but he slowly began to understand that they found him all too mortal. They were disappointed. They had probably anticipated a ten-foot-tall Texan bristling with machine guns and breathing fire. Well, he thought, too bad. They had instead a rather lean, plain young man, formerly an advertising copywriter, with a sock wound around a bloody finger and a bare right ankle. Probably, he thought, we deserve each other.

They took him into one of the houses and announced him as Lucien. Breakfast was cabbage fried with fat bacon and hunks of heavy bread washed down with cups of chicory. An older man, Gilbert, and his youngish wife served l’Americain and the Cambras maquis. After the meal, a grandmother appeared, five feet tall and swathed in black, and examined his finger, sucked her teeth in sympathy, and applied a healing paste of pounded lizards.

Finger rebound with strips of gray cloth, he headed outside to use the stone lean-to in the backyard. As he left, his host mumbled something about the American’s learning to faire le cent-onze-to make one hundred eleven. He knew the expression, which referred to the marks of three fingers down a wall. But they laughed in vain. The parting gift of his commanding officer had been twenty squares of French newspaper, wedged in his pocket at the moment of their final handshake.

It was a war of mischief.

That became apparent in the week that followed his arrival. Gilbert, in whose house he lived, said one evening that the people of Cambras had “always hated those bastards down there.” It was the contempt of mountain people for flatlanders, and it would not have been unusual to find such sentiments in parts of Tennessee or Kentucky, similarly expressed. Down there meant Epinal, St.-Die, and the small towns