J. Janes - Carnival

The Frenchman was altogether something else, even if he did wear a wedding ring he’d best change to his other hand unless he wanted to be stopped by the police and hauled in for questioning. Of a little more than medium height and blocky, he had the deep brown ox-eyes common to those people, the fists of a pugiliste- had he lost the fight that had given him the stitches? she wondered. The hair was dark brown and needing a trim, the moustache wide and bushy, and as for the eyebrows, must they give him a look that was so fierce?

Outside in the darkness, Louis couldn’t wait. ‘She’s carrying cigarettes in that lighter suitcase, Hermann. How could you do this to us? She’s let herself cosy up to you, knowing she’s with two Schweinebullen and still has hopes you’ll unwittingly waltz her through customs!’

‘ Ach, I wondered when you’d figure that out. She’s terrified of the company we’ve had to keep and feels like an utter fool for having chanced what she did and has stuck to us like glue. Go easy on her, eh? Just be your generous self and thankful that she’s let us know that Kolmar’s schwarzer Markt is flourishing. That Kolmar is with a K , by the way, not a C .’

And never mind the Deutsch. Its black market, its marche noir . Cigarettes must now be the preferred currency in the Reich, as they were in France. ‘That no-good, piano-teaching brother-in-law of hers, “that brute of a one-legged Frenchman and seducer of young girls,” was into more than student skirts, Hermann. While helping that little sister of hers go through his things, your Frau Oberkircher, for all she wishes to disclaim and hide her French origins, came upon the mother lode of fags and felt it her duty as a citizen of the Greater Reich to confiscate the evidence before her sister found it!’

As was their custom when on short rations and in need of a quiet tete-a-tete, a cigarette was rescued from an inner pocket-Louis’s this time. Kohler found them a light, and after a few drags each, they began to walk toward the centre of the old town, gripped as it was in glacial darkness.

‘Silicon carbide?’ asked St-Cyr.

‘It was close, Louis. Just be thankful the RAF came along when they did.’

‘ Ah, bon , then it’s as I’ve thought. During the war of 1870-71, the region’s Francs-Tireurs constantly harassed the Prussians. Now it’s the turn of their descendants.’

The region’s irregulars, its citizen soldiers. In Vichy, not a day-was it still only a day ago?-they’d had a final run-in with the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans , a Resistance group started by Communist railway workers in Lyons. Tough-real sons of bitches who had put Louis at the top of their hit list simply because he had to work with one of the Occupier.

‘Even though Alsace was taken in less than five days by the Prussians in 1870, Hermann, and Paris placed under siege and France defeated within five months, not five weeks as in 1940, the people of the Vosges kept much to themselves. Let’s not forget it, because we mustn’t, and just to prove it to you, I’m going to take you to have a look at the Lion.’

They had had some soup and two of the regulation twenty-five gram slices of the grey National. They had each handed over a bread ticket and had left the customary two-franc donation for the Winter Relief that was run by the Secours National, the national help.

They had tried to doze off, saying little, each knowing the other’s thoughts could well be in a turmoil. The future, which people seldom if ever thought about these days, was far too cloudy and troubling.

Then they had come out here, the shadows deepening as they had approached the rock face, while etched in silhouette on high, the chateau, the citadel, defied assault as it had during the Franco-Prussian War.

Hermann, his fedora pulled down hard, the collar of his greatcoat up and close, couldn’t seem to lower his gaze. He would be thinking of the 103-day siege that had ended twenty- shy;one days after the Armistice of that war, would be telling himself shy; that Colonel Denfert-Rochereau of place D-R in Paris shy;, its metro station, too, and countless streets in France, had defied shy; the Prussians for so long, even Bismark and the Kaiser had been forced to acknowledge the bravery and agree to freeing Belfort and its immediately surrounding territory from the fate so much of Alsace-Lorraine was to suffer. Annexation.

He would also be seeing the dead of the Great War, the long, dark lines of the trenches in the snow, the gun emplacements, would be thinking of Vieil-Armand which was less than thirty-five kilometres to the northeast of them: Alsace’s Verdun where, for eight long, hard months over the winter of 1914-15 and into the summer, more than 30,000 men had died, but not himself, the French 75s answering his own 77s which had raced ahead to twenty-five rounds a minute. The drumfire, the Germans had come to call those French guns: Das Trommel shy;feuer ; while the French poilus , the common soldiers, had spoken of the other side’s shelling as la tempete de feu , the tempest of fire. He would know, too, that his partner was all too aware of this and that its enduring memories were but one of the things that had welded the partnership, but still, reminders must always be given.

Some twenty-two metres long and eleven high, and caught against the sheer rock face below the citadel, resting on its hind quarters with right foreleg stiff and head turned a little from the rock out of which that head had been carved, the Lion, still in shadow cold, appeared as if about to roar.

‘I always wondered what it would look like, Louis, but could never bring myself to see it.’

Between 1875 and 1880, Colmar’s sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, had fashioned it largely out of blocks of that same rock as the citadel and the old town.

‘The red sandstone of the Vosges,’ muttered Hermann sadly, ‘but there’s granite to the north and northeast,’ he said as if that were the answer to everything. ‘Granite’s far harder, Louis. It splinters when struck. Forms the busts, the heart, the guts of these rounded hills here in the south, is far worse than any shrapnel.’

He touched his face, and one knew at once where those nicks and scars had come from. Belfort the ‘Heroic’ lay in the Trouee de Belfort, the Gap through which the invading hordes had come. Celts, Goths, Romans and others, the Germans of course, and more than once.

‘We could see the Black Forest from the summit of Vieil-Armand,’ he went on. ‘We could see what we called home only to then have to give up the crest of that hill to your side. Time and again we took it; time and again it was lost.’

Another cigarette was found and, once lit, passed over.

‘Gerda was waiting for me,’ he said, as if the girl he’d known as a teenager was still vital, the girl he had married and had two sons with.

‘ Ach , how times have changed, eh? Now I live with Oona and Giselle on those rare moments when we’re in Paris, while my Gerda … ’

Had begged an uncle with connections in the Nazi Party to help her get a divorce so that she could marry an indentured farm labourer from France who was helping out on her father’s farm near Wasserburg, just to the east of Munich. And yes, both Giselle and Oona had come to love him and it wasn’t difficult to see that each understood and respected the other’s feelings and willingly-yes, willingly!-shared what little they saw of him and had become fast friends themselves.

‘War does things like that,’ muttered Kohler, having read his partner’s thoughts. ‘It also brings enemies like us together, so please don’t forget it.’