The Saboteur: True Adventures Of The Gentleman Commando Who Took On The Nazis. Paul Kix

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      Makeshift shelters rose around them just off the road, and though no one heard the echo of bombs, Henri ordered his siblings to stay together as they climbed, stiff-legged, out of the car. Henri was serious and studious, the firstborn child who was also the favorite. Robert, with high cheekbones and a countenance that rounded itself into a slight pout, as if his lips were forever holding a cigarette, was the more handsome of the two, passing for something like Cary Grant’s French cousin. But he was also the wild one. He managed to attend a different boarding school nearly every year. The brothers understood that they were to watch over their younger siblings now as surrogate parents, but it was really Henri who was in charge. Robert, after all, had been the one immature enough to dangle from the parapet of the family chateau, fifty feet above the ground, or to once say shit in front of Grandmother La Rochefoucauld, for the thrill it gave his siblings.

      The children gathered together, Henri and Robert, Artus and Pierre Louis, fifteen and thirteen, and their sister Yolaine, twelve. The youngest ones, Carmen and Aimery, seven and four, naturally weren’t part of their older siblings’ clique. They were not invited to play soccer with their brothers and Yolaine, and only occasionally did they swim with them in the Aisne river, which flowed around the family estate. They were already their own unit, unaware of the idiosyncrasies and dynamics of the older crew: the way Artus favored the company of his younger brother Pierre Louis to Henri and Robert’s, or the way all the boys tended to gang up on Yolaine, the lone girl, until Robert defended her, sometimes with his fists, the bad brother with the good heart.

      Years later Robert would not recall how they spent that first night—on blankets that Consuelo had quickly stored into the trunk or with grass as their bedding and the night stars to comfort them. But he would remember walking among the great anxious swarm of humanity, who settled in clusters on a field that, under the moonlight, seemed to stretch to the horizon. Robert was as scared as the travelers around him. But, in the jokes the refugees told or even in their silent resolve, he felt a sense of fraternity spreading, tangible and real. He had often lived his life at a remove from this kind of experience: He was landed gentry, his lineage running through one thousand years of French history. When Robert and his family vacationed at exclusive resorts in Nice or Saint Tropez, they avoided mass transit, traveling aboard Grandmother La Rochefoucauld’s private rail car—with four sleeper cabs, a lounge and dining room. But the night air and communion of his countrymen stirred something in Robert, something similar to what his father, Olivier, had experienced twenty years earlier in the trenches of the Great War. There, among soldiers of all classes, Olivier had dropped his vestigial ties to monarchy and become, he said, a committed Republican. Tonight, looking out at the campfires and the families who laid down wherever they could, with whatever they had, Robert felt the urge to honor La France, and to defend it, even if the military couldn’t.

      The children were on the road for four days. As many as eight million people fled their homes during the Battle for France, or one-fifth of the country’s population. The highways became so congested during this exodus that bicycles were the best mode of travel, as if the streets of Bombay had moved to the French countryside. Abandoning their car and walking would have been quicker for the La Rochefoucaulds, but Henri would have none of it. Thousands of parents lost track of their children during the movement south, and newspapers would fill their pages for months afterward with advertisements from families in search of the missing. The La Rochefoucaulds stayed in the car, always together, nudging ahead, taking hours just to cross the Loire River on the outskirts of southern France, on one of the few bridges the Germans hadn’t bombed.

      The skies were clear of Stukas now, yet the roads remained as crowded as ever. This was a full-on panic, Robert thought, and though he wasn’t the best of students he understood its cause. It wasn’t just the invasion people saw that forced them out of their homes. It was the invasion they’d replayed for twenty years, the invasion they’d remembered.

      World War I had killed 1.7 million Frenchmen, or 18 percent of those who fought, a higher proportion than any other developed country. Many battles were waged in France, and the fighting was so horrific, its damage so ubiquitous, it was as if the war had never ended. The La Rochefoucaulds’ own estate, Villeneuve, had been a battle site, captured and recaptured seventeen times, the French defending the chateau, the Germans across the Aisne river, firing. The fighting left Villeneuve in rubble, and the neighboring town of Soissons didn’t fare much better: 80 percent of it was destroyed. Even after the La Rochefoucaulds rebuilt, the foundation of the estate showed the classic pockmarks of heavy shells. The soil of Villeneuve’s thirty-five acres smoldered for seven years from all the mortar rounds. Steam rose from the earth, too hot to till. Well into the 1930s, Robert would watch as a plow stopped and a farmhand dug out a buried artillery round or hand grenade.

      The 1,600-year-old cathedral in Soissons, where the La Rochefoucaulds occasionally went for Mass, carried the indentations of bullet and artillery fire, clustering here and boring into the edifice there, from its stone foundation to its mighty Gothic peaks. Storefronts all around them wore similar marks, while veterans like Robert’s father hobbled home after service. For Olivier, an ankle wound incurred in 1915 limited his ability to walk unassisted. His injury intruded into his pastimes: When he hunted game, he brought his wife, and Consuelo carried the gun until Olivier spotted the prey, which allowed him to momentarily ditch his cane and hoist the rifle to his shoulder. Olivier was lucky. Other veterans were so disfigured, they didn’t appear in public.

      “Throughout my childhood, I heard people talk mostly about the Great War: my parents, my grandparents, my uncles,” Robert later said. But even as it remained a constant topic, Olivier seldom discussed its basic facts: his four years at the front, as an officer whose job was to watch artillery shells land on German positions and relay back whether the next round should be aimed higher or lower. Nor did Olivier discuss the more intimate details of the fighting, as other veterans did in memoirs: stepping on the “meat” of dead comrades in an offensive or the madness the trenches induced. Instead Olivier walked the halls of Villeneuve, in some sort of private and almost unceasing conversation with the ghosts of his past. He was a distant father, telling his children that they “must not cry—ever,” and finding solace in nature’s beauty. He had earned a law degree after the war, but spent Robert’s childhood as Villeneuve’s gentleman farmer. Olivier felt most at ease talking about the dahlias he planted. Consuelo, who’d lost two brothers to the trenches, was far more outspoken. She instructed her children that they СКАЧАТЬ