It’ll make them stronger to know it.
It’ll make it easier for them to rise up again if our ideals survive us . . .
Wolff hits me again, and this time something cracks. I can’t scream or even draw a breath without agony. The next blow hammers my head by my ear. Things go bright, then black, and when I come back to myself, my thoughts are confused. Disordered. A high-pitched wail is screeching through my brain.
Nearly blinded by my own blood, I think I’m hallucinating moving tires and boots on the ground. Dogs barking at the woods, barking at the road. I drag my head from the dirt, and through red-hued tears, I see a blurry police car. Mon Dieu, is it Yves?
Has that idiot come back to see me murdered?
The tires screech, and I see my husband leaning out the window, his pistol leveled as shots ring out. One of the Gestapo officers falls backward, slumping next to the van. It’s a moment before I realize he’s been shot. I hear shouting, and my eyes are caked with blood and dust, but I catch a glimpse of Yves scrambling out of the car to take cover, gun drawn.
Wolff drops his baton in the dirt and yanks his pistol from its holster, his draw lightning-fast.
A moment later, Travert drops, falls backward, clutching his chest, his mouth open in silent agony and his legs splayed. “Yves!” I twist, trying to pull myself up, trying to crawl to him on my belly in the dirt. I call his name again and again as he writhes, red blood flowing from his stained uniform out over his fingers.
Then my screams are silenced by the rat-tat-tat of submachine-gun fire cutting through the air from the direction of the solarium. I turn in time to see Wolff’s cap fly off his head. Then his face explodes in a gory crimson spray. Everything goes quiet. Everything but the dogs and Travert’s groaning. I am bloody and disoriented, but through the blur of my tears, I’m sure I see boys in scout uniforms. Young Daniel and Oscar on the solarium porch with submachine guns on their shoulders, the pried-up floorboards scattered, and maquisards melting out of the woods to help us.
SIXTY-TWO
BEATRICE
Chavaniac
November 1918
The war was over.
My dearest, Max wrote.
I’ll never be able to paint a picture of the ecstatic joy of our soldiers, of the cheers of ragged civilians as we came to liberate them. Never mind the rubble, the fly-bedeviled corpses, the rotting horses, the smoke from still-smoldering fires—there has never been any place I’ve been happier to be, save in your arms. Soon I will be free to come to you; that is my one constant thought.
It was my one constant thought too, and I was equal parts eager and anxious. Everyone around me was jubilant. I too felt palpable joy. Relief at an end to the carnage. Pride in victory for my country and cause. Hope we’d all have a part in shaping a better future.
Still, I felt sadness too. Particularly for Emily, whose husband had been in a near-fatal crash. One that broke his ribs, his collarbone, and pierced his lung. She’d gone straightaway to his hospital in Bordeaux, praising God he was alive, but with such injuries—and an operation performed without the benefit of chloroform—the recovery would be difficult, and who could guess if the baron might ever be himself again?
In some ways, I didn’t know if Emily would ever be herself again. She was done with war. Wanted nothing but private life now, with her husband and daughter. So I dared not share my petty and private grief to know that with the war over . . . I would never again do such important work. In a world where men returned to their usual positions of authority in the workplace and in home life, I would never again be seen as someone who could be useful to her country.
And I feared that I would never again be so much myself.
It was a winter day when Max was finally released from his military duties, the weather crisp, clear, and cold. I’d had no warning of his visit to Chavaniac, and startled to see him stride through the gate past a white-clad nurse and a tall stack of Red Cross crates, to find me kneeling in the yard, tying the bootlaces of a little rogue who had lately been pestering the doctoresse to play with her bag of instruments. A nearby rooster crowed at my cavalier’s approach, then flapped its wings when Max wordlessly pulled me to my feet and into his embrace. He didn’t say my name. He didn’t mutter platitudes. He just held me, squeezing so tight I could scarcely breathe. We stood that way for such a long time, just holding each other and breathing in the healing pine-scented air, until I finally took Max’s face in my hands and whispered a tearful, “Is the war over?”
He nodded, eyes shining, as if he too marveled that we’d both survived it all somehow. “For me it is. One of my superiors suggested I might be part of a force to occupy Germany for the next two years; but I’d have shot myself in the leg before I’d let them keep me away from you another hour.”