J. Janes: Clandestine

L’Abbaye de Vauclair, thought St-Cyr, and here he was facing it again but in an entirely different way.

Down through the encroaching forest, up against the ruins shy; of the monastery and definitely not where it should be, an armoured shy; Renault van with open doors awaited. Even from a distance and through a heavy downpour they could read the necessary: BANQUE NATIONALE DE CREDIT ET COMMERCIAL, SIEGE SOCIAL, 43 BOULEVARD DES CAPUCINES, PARIS.

A difficult address, given the implications such could have these days, but an even more formidable crime if given the needs of the Resistance, considering that only two days ago Dr. Julius Ritter, Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel’s forced-labour man in France, had been shot dead as he stood on the corner of the rue des Reservoirs in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, home and/or office space to so many of the Occupier.

‘Oberg’s going to scream his head off, Louis. Boemelburg will be in a rage, Berlin on the line again and blaming them both for not having kept “order”,’ said Kohler.

Lately Hermann’s bosses had caused him to worry more than usual and with good reason. Karl Oberg was the Hoherer SS und Polizeifuhrer of France, Walter Boemelburg being its Gestapo chief. It was a Friday. Sometimes those could be good days, if a Saturday half-day and Sunday break could be allowed, though now, it being 1 October 1943, that was highly unlikely. But since the bodies were not with the van and there was no immediate rush, they could take their time and he could fill Hermann in on the ruins and everything else.

‘Why us, Louis? Why when we damn well know the end is in sight and that idiot of a carpet-biter is still bent on destroying everything?’

Hermann never missed an opportunity to nail the Fuhrer with the latest descriptive. Like a lot of other things from home, he had ways of finding such and conjuring them when needed, but ‘spring’ really was coming, an Allied invasion all but certain since the war in Russia was going very badly for the Wehrmacht, and Berlin and lots of other cities in the Reich were persistently being bombed by the RAF at night and the USAAF during the day. It would be wise to take his mind off things and focus it on what was needed. ‘ Ah bon, mon vieux , Rocheleau, the local garde champetre , awaits. Somehow he has managed a small fire and will be warming us a welcoming cup of le the de France .’

Lemon balm! No sugar, of course, but no saccharine, either. Just the herb water and a few bits of leaves. The rural policeman.

‘Hermann, the nervousness you continue to exhibit requires the calming that tea will bring. Be your generous self. We may not just need what he will begrudgingly tell us, but everything else he will attempt to hold back.’

After an initial gust of flame to start the fire, that thin pillar of smoke had continued to rise well beyond the van and was now all but lost among the ruins. ‘He’s in what remains of the refectory,’ said St-Cyr. ‘That’s appropriate, where the monks used to take their meals. Corbeny, his village, is but five or so kilometres to the east. Rocheleau will know the ruins well.’

Longing for a cigarette if one had it to light and could do so in such a deluge, Kohler held this partner of his back a moment. ‘Now be so good as to tell me how you even knew it would be lemon balm?’

It was a logical enough question, given the state some of the Occupier had got themselves into, though Hermann wasn’t really one of those, not with the past three years of their having worked together day after day solving common crime and doing so honestly in an age of rampant dishonesty. ‘Ah, because the monks left a herb garden that has not only maintained itself over the forgotten years, but peacefully conquered the adjacent land.’

‘Peacefully? Bitte, mein Lieber, don’t rub it in. You’ve been here before.’

‘First in September 1914, but that was a little before your side decided that the only way to hold Falkenhayn’s line after the First Battle of Ypres was to invent the abominable trench warfare that would tragically dominate the next four miserable years of that other war you people caused us to declare.’

Credit given where credit was due, eh? ‘The Great War, was it, and not the Franco-Prussian?’

‘Both, but the later one, of course. Now take a few drags of this reserve I’ve kept hidden. Let me cup my hands over the match you will have to light.’

‘I’ve run out. We’ll need his fire. And that second visit?’

They were both edgy, and with good reason, for the SS of the avenue Foch and Gestapo of the rue des Saussaies could be far from calm and the partnership would be blamed no matter what. ‘April 1917 when, in five days, 29,000 of our boys were killed, myself having been spared due to the sniper’s bullet that nearly took off my left shoulder. Nivelle had ordered Mangin “the ferocious” to attack that ridge behind me. Nivelle’s plan was simple. After all, he was a general. In the first three hours we were to take the entire 3,000 metres of the steep and heavily wooded limestone scarp that forms the other side of that ridge, and never mind the natural caves, the ancient and more recent quarries, and even the German trenches, entanglements of barbed wire and machine guns we had to face. In the second two hours we were to cover this side-it’s easier going downhill, isn’t it?-therefore an additional 2,000 metres of the flat valley floor in which these ruins lie were called for. Though the official casualties were 130,000, and of yourselves some 163,000, the French figures should, I think, rightfully be 187,000 with 40,000 dead before that “engagement” was broken off. Nivelle went out in disgrace, Petain came in, and now we’re still stuck with that pitiful octogenarian.’

Who had all but elected himself prime minister of France in June 1940 and had settled the government in that playground of the Empress Eugenie, the spa town of Vichy which the partnership knew only too well, having been there early last February.

‘ Travail, Famille et Patrie , Hermann.’

Work, Family and Country, not Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite.

‘Traison , Louis. Famine et Prison, that’s what the graffiti artists recently slapped on the boarding that surrounds the Palais du Luxembourg to keep away the grenades someone might throw at the headquarters of the Luftwaffe here in the West.’

In June 1940 Reichsmarschall Goring had taken it over and had had that fence put up when so few would even have thought to throw such, but now … ?

‘That ridge is the Chemin des Dames, Louis, with the “walk” your Louis XV made atop it for his daughters when they went to visit the duchess of Narbonne at her Chateau de la Bove. There are strategic viewpoints along its thirty-five or so kilometres and it separates the valleys of the river Ailette, here to the north, from that of the Aisne to the south. We’re probably a little less than 150 kilometres to the northeast of Paris, maybe 35 north from Reims and 15 south from Laon.’

Good for Hermann. He was now prepared to focus on the job at hand. ‘Just don’t “Chief” me in front of Rocheleau. I prevented him from throwing his weapon away and running but foolishly failed to report him to his superior officer.’

‘Must you continue to attract old enemies I then have to put up with?’

‘Detectives always do, Hermann. It’s part of the job. We’re just not paid for it.’

Founded in 1134 at the request of the Benedictine bishop, Barthelemy du Jur, l’Abbaye de Vauclair had been extremely successful for over 600 years only to then be auctioned off for next to nothing after the Revolution. Turned into a farm, its substantial church had become a barn, the whole of its buildings being used and decaying to then be put up for sale a last time in 1911, only to be reduced to the present rubble during the offensive of April 1917 and subsequent battles, for the oft-stagnant front had run right through here.