The Polish Officer

When he returned, the aroma came with him. He stopped at the open door, wiped the muck off his boots, then entered, his arms full of rifles. He laid them out on the kitchen table and proceeded to strip off the oiled paper that had protected them. He dumped an old tin can on the table, moving bullets with a thick forefinger, and counted to eighteen. “Souvenirs of the war,” he said to de Milja.

There were four rifles, Soulier and Bonneau each took one. Jeanne-Marie wasn’t expected to use such things, and de Milja declined. He carried a 9 mm Italian automatic that had found its way to him, part of the Anton Stein persona, but he had no intention of shooting at anybody.

Soulier examined one of the rifles. “We kept these with us in the tank just in case,” he said.

Just in case, de Milja thought, the 1914 war started up again. They were bolt-action rifles, with five-round magazines, and far too many soldiers in the French infantry had carried them in 1940.

De Milja looked meaningfully at his watch. Soulier said fondly, “Ah my friend, do not concern yourself too much. We’re not in the city now, you know. Life here happens in its own time.”

“We’ll have to explain that to the pilot,” de Milja said.

Soulier laughed heartily—sarcasm was of absolutely no use with him. “There’s no point in worrying about that,” he said. “These contraptions have never yet been on time.”

The BBC Message Personnel—delivered in a cluster of meaningless phrases to deny the Germans analysis of traffic volume—had been broadcast forty-eight hours earlier. In the afternoon, visit the cathedral at Rouen. Then confirmed, a day later, by the BBC’s playing Django Reinhardt’s “In a Sentimental Mood” at a specified time.

They had avoided offending the hospitality of Madame Soulier, but the Bonneau reception committee was now behind schedule. They tried riding their bicycles across the countryside, but it was too dark, and most of the time they had to walk, following cattle paths that wound around the low hills, soaking their feet when the land turned to marsh, sweating with effort in the cold night air.

De Milja had been right, they were late getting to the field Jeanne-Marie had chosen. But Soulier was right too—the contraption had not been on time. A triumph of what was called System D, D for the verb debrouiller, to muddle through, to manage somehow. First used to describe the French railway system’s response to supply obligations in the war of 1914, it explained, in a few syllables, the French method of managing life.

They got to the field late, four instead of the expected six, and had to hurry to arrange the brush piles. Somehow they managed, although the head of the arrow that indicated wind direction was missing one side. Then Bonneau stopped dead, looked up, signaled for quiet. A low, distant hum. Getting louder, a drone. Then, clearly, the sound of airplane engines. “Les flambeaux!” Soulier cried.

It was Jeanne-Marie who actually had matches. The torches were lit. Rags, smeared thickly with pitch-pine resin and knotted at the ends of branches, they crackled and sputtered and threw wild shadows across the meadow as the reception party ran from brush pile to brush pile. Jeanne-Marie and de Milja raced past each other on the dead run—by firelight he saw her face, close to tears with anger and pride, with fierce joy.

In the clouds above them, a Whitley bomber, slow and cumbersome.

The pilot banked gently to get a better view of the land below him. He had sifted through the air defenses on the Brittany coast—a few desultory rounds of ack-ack, nothing more, the gunners not sorry to hear him droning off to somebody else’s sector. Then he’d followed the Loire, just about due east, the shadow of his plane cast by moonlight running next to the river. He picked up the Vienne—he hoped— branching south, then found the confluence of the Creuse and the Gartempe. Here he adjusted his bearing, a few degrees south of east, and watched the seconds tick away. Now, he thought.

Nothing there, dark and peaceful fields. Then came the voice of his navigator, “Here we are. Just a little north of us, sir.”

An orange fire appeared below—then another and another as the pilot watched. He pushed a button, a green light went on in the cargo hold but the drop-master could see as well as he could. First the crates, shoved out the door, white parachutes flaring off into the darkness before they caught the wind and jerked upright, swaying down toward the fires in the field below.

“Best of luck to you, gentlemen,” said the drop-master and the four French paratroopers jumped in rapid succession. They had been given little paper French flags to take down with them and one of them, Lucien, the leader, actually managed to hold one aloft as he floated to earth. He had left France from the port of Dunkirk, not quite a year earlier, by swimming toward a British fishing boat. His pants and shirt and officer’s cap were left on the beach, his pistol was at the bottom of the Channel. He thought, as the wind rushed past him, he heard someone cry out down below.

That was Soulier, crazed with excitement. “It worked! By God it worked!” He might have said Vive la France—the paratroopers would certainly have appreciated the sentiment—but, for the moment, surprise had exceeded patriotism. The paratroopers wrestled free of their harness, then menaced the night with their Sten guns, but there was only the reception committee in the field, so they greeted each other formally, embraced, and talked in whispers. Then the officer excused himself to Jeanne-Marie, turned away, undid his fly, watered a rock, and mumbled something relieved and grateful under his breath—thus, at last, was Vive la France said on that occasion.

As the fires burned themselves out, they took Soulier’s pry bar and tore open the crates. Unpacked two dozen Sten guns—rapid-firing carbines of no particular range but brutal effect up close, the British solution to the problem of a weapon for clandestine war. There were W/T sets, maps printed on silk, cans of a nasty green jelly that British scientists had concocted to burn down Europe.

Everything took longer than they’d calculated. With dawn came a cold, dirty drizzle, the wind blowing the smell of raw spring earth off the fields. Using the bicycles as carts they hauled the shipment off to Soulier’s farm. Were suitably impressed when Soulier reached down through the pig shit and opened a trapdoor in the earth, as the tenant of the sty looked on, slit-eyed and suspicious, from the fence where he’d been tied up.

Once again, on local trains to Vannes.

De Milja had appointed Jeanne-Marie liaison officer for the Kampfgeschwader 100 attack. Bonneau and Soulier to handle logistics and supply, the paratroopers to do the actual shooting.

They rode together in the first-class compartment. Jeanne-Marie, with open shirt collar spread across the lapels of a dark suit and mannish hat with feather, looked exactly like what she was—a part of the high bourgeois or petit nobility—the French land-owning class. De Milja, briefcase in hand, hat with brim snapped down—her provincial lawyer.

Two German officers entered their compartment at Poitiers, very polite and correct. From their insignia, they were involved with engineering—perhaps construction. Essentially they were German businessmen, on leave from daily life in Frankfurt or Dusseldorf or wherever it was in order to fight a war. Still, a great deal of silence in the compartment. Jeanne-Marie, living just below the Vichy line, had not seen many Germans and wasn’t really used to moving around among them. For their part, the Germans found French women irresistible, and Jeanne-Marie, pale and reserved with small, fine features and aristocratic bearing, was of a type particularly attractive to the officer class.

“Would Madame care to have the window open?” one of them said, using vacation French.

“No, thank you.”

“Not too warm for you, in here?”

“Quite comfortable, thank you.”

“Well then . . .”

The train chugged along, the fields of the Poitou plain falling away slowly behind them.

“I wonder, sir, if you can tell me what time we arrive in Nantes?”

“I’m not really certain,” de Milja said.

“Just after two, perhaps?”

“I believe that’s right.”

The man smiled at Jeanne-Marie: isn’t it satisfying, in some deliciously mysterious way, for us all to be rolling through the French countryside together? Not actually an adventure, not quite that. But, surely, not the usual thing either. Wouldn’t you agree?

In this rising tide of banality, de Milja sensed danger. Just such moments, he knew, could turn fatal. You did not see it coming.