Night Soldiers

between. Down there meant tax collectors and municipal authorities and Gendarmerie and all those blood-sucking leeches who made a poor man’s life a misery. Between Cambras and down there was a kind of truce, worked out over a long time, the flatlanders silently agreeing to bother the people of Cambras only a little, and the mountain people accepting just about that much botherment. They lived with each other-just.

When, however, you added a heavy-handed Teutonic authority to this chemistry, a certain amount of hell was bound to break loose. The people of Cambras now took it as a divine mission to bother the schleuhs, as they called them, while avoiding too much interest from those they called la geste. The Gestapo. The French version of the name carried with it a certain amount of irony-bold deed-but it was quite clear to everyone that these Gestapo people were better left alone. They had made that evident early on. Had then taken to strutting about in leather coats and tearing around the roads in Grosser Mercedes sedans. Here we are, they said. Try your luck.

So, in Cambras, until Lucien showed up, they’d had to content themselves with mischief, testing always to see what the reaction might be. A mistake was painful. When Vigie had somehow contrived to obtain a concussion grenade, Alceste Vau and the others had snuck inside the perimeter of a Panzer division encampment near Epinal and dropped it into a septic tank that served the officers’ latrine-just about the time it was in full use. Judging from the noise level inside the barrack, the result had been spectacular. Fountains. And, better yet, there’d been no response from the Germans. But when Sable had become obsessed by an obnoxious poodle-the adored pet of a headquarters Feldwebel, who spoke German babytalk to it on the street-and had blown the thing’s fluffy head apart with an old army pistol stolen from Gilbert, the local pharmacist and his wife had been stood against a wall. Reprisal. The townspeople took the orphans in, but they had a good notion of who had done it, and Sable had to visit relatives in another village for a time. They’d learned that angry people are dangerous, that one couldn’t be sure what they’d do, especially when the means to a hard lesson were so near at hand-the right word in the right ear was all it would have taken.

In that same week, Eidenbaugh began to have a feel for the currents that ran beneath the surface of village life. There was a young girl, perhaps fifteen, who lived with Gilbert and his family. Cecille, she was called, a poor thing treated as servant or dishonored cousin by the rest of the household. Heavy, with a wan, immobile face, she stared at the floor when spoken to. She had come visiting one night, approaching his straw pallet in the corner of the eating room and standing there until he awoke, suddenly, startled by an apparition in a soiled flannel nightdress. He had sent her away-in kind fashion, he hoped-for the briefers had been crystal clear on this point, especially the aristocratic Englishman-known only as Major F.-who had lived for years in Paris. “Village life is sexually quite complex, dear boy, don’t be drawn in,” the British officer had cautioned. And it soon became obvious that he’d been right. Cecille was visited, on successive nights, by Sable and by Daniel Vau, the younger brother. Daniel, in addition, looked at Gilbert’s youngish wife in a quite explicit way. Eidenbaugh hadn’t any idea how Gilbert reacted to it-he seemed not to notice.

Meanwhile, he familiarized himself with his surroundings, spent a good deal of his time walking the fields and forests around Cambras, learning the trails from La Brebis and Vigie, and listening each night to the messages personnels on the wireless, which held an honored position on a table in the center of the room. The volume of traffic surprised him, though a portion of it was certainly dross, designed to mislead the Germans as to the actual level of underground activity. Finally, ten days after he’d landed in the field, the words crackled from the radio: Limelight, la theatre est ferme. His activation signal. He told Gilbert he would be away for a time, and the man offered to accompany him. “Now that you are here,” he said, “it is all different. Nothing against the young ones, they are the patriots of Cambras, but I am a patriot of France, a veteran of the war. The schleuhs gassed me at Verdun.” Eidenbaugh thought about the offer for a moment-by the rules, he was supposed to go alone-but there was something of a test in Gilbert’s manner, and he decided to trust the man. “Unless you are monumentally stupid or terribly unlucky,” the briefers had told him, “the Germans won’t catch you. On the other hand, the chances of being betrayed, for any number of reasons, political or otherwise, are better than one would like.”

But he had to trust somebody, so he trusted Gilbert.

The train ride from Epinal to Belfort was nasty-cold and sweaty at once-and he vowed not to do it again. In the aisle was a great press of bodies, including German soldiers and airmen, making for two hours of sour breath, wet wool, a baby that wouldn’t shut up, vacant faces, tired eyes, and icy drafts that blew through spaces between the boards of the ancient wagon-lit. Vintage 1914, he thought. A good deal of French rolling stock had traveled east to Germany-to be refitted for the different gauge-then sent on to Wehrmacht units near Moscow, there to vanish forever.

It took them two hours to travel forty-two miles, over oft-damaged and repaired track, shunted aside for flatcars carrying artillery pieces to the Atlantic coast, unable to attain much speed because of coal adulterated by sand and gravel. Gilbert, however, turned out to be a traveling companion of great comfort, prattling away the whole time about the health of his pigs and the price of cheese and “Lucien’s” mother-supposedly Gilbert’s sister- and every sort of mindless gossip that made for soothing cover and got the journey over with as quickly as possible. For his part, Eidenbaugh grunted and nodded, went along with the game, and acted as though he were pretending to listen to his boring uncle.

At both the Epinal and Belfort stations-especially the latter, which was close to Switzerland and thus a magnet for just about anything in occupied Europe that wasn’t nailed down-la geste was much in evidence, pointedly in the business of watching. To Eidenbaugh they had the feel of provincial police inspectors, stocky and middle-aged, clumsy looking in their high-belted leather coats, and very stolid. Their eyes never stopped searching, a stare beyond rudeness that picked your life apart from subtle clues almost absurdly evident to their experienced gaze. Clearly a game but, just as clearly, a game they were good at. It scared Eidenbaugh so badly that a muscle ticked inside his cheek. When they saw something-what? — one of them would snap his fingers and beckon the individual over for a document check, holding the paper up to the white sky above the station platform. Gilbert, bless his heart, faltered not a whit, blabbering him past la geste and the usual police checkpoints with the story of his maman insisting that the roof be retiled, just at planting time, not a seed in the ground, and rain coming. But, Gilbert shrugged, one must obey the maman. What else could one do?

It was not the usual Gilbert who went to Belfort. The usual Gilbert sported a permanent gray stubble of whisker beneath a beat-up old beret, layers of shapeless sweaters, baggy wool pants, and rubber boots well mucked from the farmyard. The Belfort Gilbert, understanding without being told that he was to be no part of the business there, had shaven himself raw and produced a Sunday suit that wore its age proudly. In the street outside the station, he bade Eidenbaugh farewell and went off whistling, with a light step. Clearly, his mission in Belfort was a romantic one.

Contact procedures for ULYSSE called for a visit to the Bureau de Poste near the railroad station. Eidenbaugh stood in line, at last approached the counter attended by a woman in her fifties with two chins, blazing lipstick, and an immense nest of oily black hair. He pushed a letter across the marble counter and requested six stamps in addition. The woman barely glanced at him, weighing the letter-addressed to a certain name in a certain town-and tearing six stamps off a sheet with bureaucratic ceremony. He looked at the stamps, an occupation issue prominently featuring the new national motto that, the Germans insisted, had now replaced Liberta, egalite, fraternita-travail, famille, patrie. Work, family, and fatherland. In the corner of one stamp was a lightly penned address.

This turned out to be a boucherie chevaline-horsemeat butcher-in a working-class neighborhood an hour’s walk from the center of town. There he was waited on by a girl of nineteen or so, in hairnet and white butcher apron, nonetheless beautiful, her hands bright red from handling iced meat. “Do you have any pate of rabbit?” he asked, naming a product never sold in such a store. She didn’t miss a beat. “You can’t buy that here,” she said. “Well,” he answered, “my wife craves it and she is pregnant.” “Ah,” she said, “you must return in twenty minutes, we might have some then.” He circled the neighborhood-it was better to keep moving; hanging about in cafes, if you weren’t local, drew too many eyes-and returned on the minute. “So,” the girl said, “perhaps we have some in the back.” He went through the door she indicated, found himself in a coldroom amid rows of hanging quarters on ceiling hooks. Ulysse appeared at the other end of the central aisle, his breath steaming in the cold.

Ulysse was in his fifties, handsome and silver-haired, clearly an aristocrat, in a finely cut gray suit with an