in both instances he found himself confronted with the political realities of the early resistance. The active groups in the region were dedicated communists, fighting both to defeat the Germans and to obtain political power for themselves. They were suspicious of him-he turned aside their ideological questions, and could find no way to be forthcoming about his past. When further meetings were suggested, in remote areas, he did not attend.
But by the fall of 1942 he had determined to put his caution aside and join the fighting no matter the danger. His conscience gnawed at him, and the peaceful joys of his existence turned bitter. He fabricated a history that could not, he thought, be vetted by the maquis organizations and prepared himself to withstand hostile interrogation.
The fabrication was, however, not to be tested. He spent the late fall and early winter in bed; a yellow blush tinged his cheekbones, his kidneys throbbed with pain, and his physical energy simply drained away. The two sisters cared for him as best they could, he would emerge from bouts of fever to find Sophie wiping the perspiration from his body with a damp cloth. He was, during the worst moments, delirious, joining a spirit world where every age of his life returned to him in vivid form and color and he called out to childhood friends and NKVD officers as they floated brightly past his vision. He was again a waiter in Paris, wept at Aleksandra’s absence, rowed his father across the Dunav, and hung his head in shame in the Vidin schoolhouse.
“Who is May?” Sophie asked tenderly when he woke to reality on a winter afternoon.
He whispered that he did not know.
On another occasion-a week later or perhaps a month, he had lost track of time-he came to his senses to discover both sisters huddled against the bedroom wall, their eyes wide with fright. What had he said? Had he confessed to phantom deeds, or real ones? With all his meager strength he turned himself toward them and held out his hands, pleading silently for forgiveness.
He recovered slowly. It was June before he could properly strip the udder on the milk cow. Rebuilding a sawhorse, he counted twenty hammer strokes before a nail was thoroughly driven. He had all his life taken physical strength for granted and was appalled at how slowly it returned to him. At times he feared he would never again be the same.
Then, in the late autumn of 1943, they had a visitor, a boy from the village down below. After a whispered conference, he was invited in and fed lavishly. The food and wine made him loquacious. He had come to enlist the services of Christophe for the Cambras maquis, he said. Everyone could do something, even Christophe. There were Sten magazines to be loaded, bicycle wheels to be repaired. He spoke grandly of one Lucien, who would lead them to glory in forays against the hated Germans. Christophe might well be allowed, after sufficient service, to fire one of the formidable Stens.
Khristo only pretended to mull it over. There was a debt to be paid, to a French priest, more particularly to those whose sacrifices had enabled him to appear at the Sante, and Khristo meant to repay it by service in the one trade he knew. Thus, on a clear night in December, he ate fresh bread and warm milk in the kitchen, accepted the tearful embraces of Sophie and Marguerite, and, long before dawn, walked out across the fields with the machine pistol slung over his shoulder. His boots crunched the hard crust of snow and he marched in time, the brilliant moonlight casting a soldier’s shadow before him.
They operated quietly in the first months of 1944.
The plaque tournant operation had been one of an enormous range of Anglo- American actions concentrated over a period of a few days, including operations against railroads, factories, shipping, and communications: an intelligence feint, the first in a series leading up to the Allied landing in Occupied Europe. The Germans knew a major attack was coming but the when and where factors were critical, and the chief Allied intelligence mission was to create a structure in which deceptions could succeed. At the London intelligence bases, they knew that pins went up on maps in the Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst (SS) analysis centers-where they understood intelligence feints and deceptions quite well themselves. Thus some of the operations had to be transparent, some translucent, and others opaque. In certain instances, all three characteristics could be combined in a single action. The technique was not new, the tactics of deception and disinformation and special operations behind enemy lines had been well known and used by Hannibal, in the Punic Wars against the Romans. All in all, it was like an orchestra led by an invisible conductor-sometimes the violins played, sometimes the reeds disappeared-and it drove the Germans slightly mad, which it was also intended to do.
Locomotives were not the principal objective in the attack on the Bruyeres railyards. This was not Sabotage, General-it was Sabotage, Specific. The actual target was an ammunition train making up in the yards from various parts of Occupied Europe and due to leave forty-eight hours after the attack, bound for the defense lines that protected a span of beaches in Normandy. There would be no major landing in winter, the Germans knew that, but they also knew about dress rehearsals, and the plaque tournant action, along with others that week, was ultimately read as a deceptive action, meant to mislead German planners into believing that a dress rehearsal was in progress for a future attack against the sheltered beaches at the edge of the Cotentin Peninsula- precisely where, six months later, they were to take place.
German intelligence in the Epinal region was not able to find out precisely who had attacked the Bruyeres yards, but gossip did reach them, was intended to reach them, that it was no more than a bunch of village toughs led by a low-level Special Operations technician. They sent a platoon up to Cambras-one of several villages that interested them-but the maquis lookouts on the road passed the word and the group took to the brush with time to spare, cramming themselves into a woodcutter’s hut high up on the mountain and waiting it out. Cambras covered by a thin layer of snow was even less impressive than Cambras in its normal condition. The German officer looked in the houses and smelled the smells and saw frightened eyes peering from doorways and the chicken sitting on the fountain and, with Teutonic respect for symbols-of power or insignificance-wrote it off. So, ultimately, in Berlin it was a white pin they stuck in Bruyeres and not a red one. The information was wired back from Berlin to counterespionage field units in the Belfort sector and, because a Polish factory worker had stolen a German cipher machine at the very start of the war and Polish and British cryptanalysts had broken the codes, the Allies knew they’d succeeded. And put a pin in their own map.
Eidenbaugh’s mission called for ongoing operations at a low level, so, in response to a coded Limelight message, he continued to harass the schleuhs. But gently, gently. A telephone pole cut down. Children’s jacks with sharpened points strewn about to blow the tires of the telephone repair vehicle. The occasional tree felled across the road. Which halted supply columns while convoy troops plodded through the snowy woods, making sure there wasn’t a nasty surprise around the curve. There was no ambush, just a tree, but it kept the Germans nervous, kept them busy, kept them frustrated. What they were getting, that winter, were pranks, at a level calculated to exclude reprisal against civilians. The Cambras maquis blew up the coeurs d’aguilles, metal castings that enabled the switching of locomotives from track to track. They pry-barred rails apart so that a locomotive plowed up hundreds of ties as it derailed, then left a charge behind for the railroad crane that would arrive to put the damage right. But only a small charge, meant to damage a wheel, to keep the huge thing out of action for a week.
They also, under Eidenbaugh’s close direction, recruited new members. Ulysse, in their second meeting-at a commercial traveler’s hotel between Belfort and Epinal-altered the KIT FOX mission by relieving Eidenbaugh from any further attempt to install a courrier. That assignment had been an error-Eidenbaugh had all he could do to operate his own small group and find and train new maquisards.
He got all sorts.
There were soldiers of fortune-called condottieri in traditional intelligence parlance-former criminals who hoped to make their fortunes in wartime targets of opportunity. There were everyday citizens, who had held themselves out of the fighting until they saw which way the wind was blowing and now rushed to get in on things before it was too late. Service in the underground, they now saw, would count professionally after the war. Such types were called, with some contempt, naphtalenes- mothballs. Meanwhile the Cambras maquis-the original group in the immediate area, lest anyone forget-strutted about grandly with cigarettes stuck in one corner of the mouth, eyes well slitted, and Stens slung diagonally across the back, mountain style.
Mountain style. Better because it left the hands free, enabling one to move swiftly and safely on the treacherous paths, better for riding a horse or a mule, and better because that was the way it had
