It took me twenty minutes to walk around the wall of Laon, along a muddy farm track I chose to avoid the vehicular traffic. I had learned at least one thing from Les, and that was how to recognize the sound of a Sten being cocked as someone worked the bolt. My boots were heavy with mud, and I was passing between two dilapidated farm buildings. I froze. That may have saved my life, because the armed twelve-year-old in the doorway to my left didn’t seem to know what to do next. Maybe he’d only trained on moving targets. The old man behind him coughed, spat into the mud and said ‘Enough,’ in guttural French, and asked me if I was a deserter. I said, ‘No. RAF aircrew. I lost my clothes in a crash.’ I tried to make my French sound less efficient than it was. I remembered that the English were supposed to be cack-handed at European languages. He spat again.
‘You speak good French.’ So much for that.
‘My school was keen on it.’
‘You have proof of identity, of course, or did you lose that in the crash, as well?’
I moved my hand, and the boy twitched. The old man pushed him not too gently to the side. This time I fished my ID discs from around my neck. I told him, ‘I have a pay-book as well.’
The old man nodded, and didn’t speak for at least thirty seconds, then he sighed. Regretfully, I think. He would have preferred to have killed me. The interrogation took a new route. He asked, ‘You are a socialist?’
‘I am a nothing. I have no time for politicians.’
‘Ah.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘In Laon it is better that you are not a socialist in these times.’
‘Then I shall not be a socialist in Laon.’ I thought that I was being amusing.
‘So young, and so wise.’ He thought he was being ironic.
‘Can I take my feet out of the mud now?’ I asked him.
He jerked his head. I moved. He asked, ‘Where are you going?’
‘I was looking for the way into Laon. To buy food and drink, if I can.’
It must have been the word buy that bucked him up. His smile showed gaps in his teeth you could get a pipe stem into.
‘For one?’
‘For more than one.’
‘Ah . . . you mean the two brave British soldiers sleeping in the car you so badly hid in Modoc’s farmyard?’
The old man had me. I grinned.
‘Yes, those. One, at least, is a brave British soldier. He has fought in France, North Africa, Italy and now France again.’
‘I know a man like that. He says that he has been in every retreat the British Army has made in this war.’
‘That is cruel, M’sieur.’
‘But it is also funny.’
‘Yes,’ I told him, and grinned again. ‘How do I get into Laon? Is there a gate in this long wall?’
He said, ‘Uh,’ and, ‘We will walk with you.’
He joined me in the mud. So did the child. The child sank up to his ankles. When he smiled happily at me I saw he had the same gaps in his teeth as the old man. We squelched on together until we reached a metalled road; the old man alongside me, and the child behind. Even through the mud I could smell the old man’s feet. I asked him, ‘Is it still necessary to guard the track?’
‘No,’ he told me. ‘We stopped that the day we were liberated.’
‘What were you doing then; back there?’
‘Rabbits.’
‘With a machine gun?’
‘Big rabbits.’ It was all he’d say on the subject.
The road passed through the wall, and turned immediately to starboard, following the curve of the hill upwards. It had been constructed as a defended causeway: there was always a wall on each side of you until you climbed out into a square, and a couple of weird churches. One was as big as York Minster, made of gold-grey coloured stone and washed by the sunlight. It staggered under the weight of thousands of small Gothic sculptures of grotesque animals and mythical beings. The other was small and circular and squatted in its shade. It had an open porch with pillars. The old man rested us there. On a piece of level ground covered with coarse sand a group of men played bowls with stone cannonballs, and drank from greasy wine bottles. A lot of staggering about seemed to be going on. Finally a fat man with thick black hair came into the porch, and plonked himself down alongside me. He mopped his brow with a clean, red handkerchief, wiped his hands with it, and offered one to me. The ritual shake. He gripped my hand a funny way, and frowned when I did the wrong thing.
‘Rey. Mayor,’ he said. ‘I was two years the Mayor when the Boche came. Then there was a German administrator. I still have two years left to do. I start them now. Are you a socialist?’
‘Not this week. How about you?’
He laughed at the challenge.
‘This week I am a Gaullista.’
‘Is that a good choice?’
‘This week it is. You are the Englishman who speaks good French. Clément thinks that you are a spy. It is Clément who you came in with.’
‘We weren’t introduced. I am not a spy. How did you know what he thinks?’
‘His daughter told us.’
‘I saw no daughter.’
‘She stayed behind in the barn, and then ran up here
