Army of Shadows by John Harris

Author:John Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Army of Shadows
ISBN: 9780755127634
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2013-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

Two

‘If something doesn’t happen soon,’ Urquhart said, ‘this bloody place will explode.’

For a whole month there had been no sign of the liberation they’d expected, no sign of any backward movement from the Germans. And when the weather at the end of June deteriorated into gale force winds which wrecked shipping off the Normandy coast, broke up floating piers and swept away helpless vessels, it even began to look as though it would be 1948 before Burgundy was freed.

‘For the love of God,’ Reinach raged, ‘when shall we be able to do something?’

Though in Dijon and Besançon railway engines were being disabled, and points, roundhouses and bridges blown up, seen against the vast panorama of the invasion, they were mere pinpricks which the Germans always savagely avenged. In Gascony, twelve hundred of them had wiped out eighty men of the Maquis, shooting the wounded or smashing their skulls with rifle butts before forbidding their families to collect their bodies so that they were left in the sun to rot. Only on the Vercors massif, near Grenoble, was there any organised resistance.

‘They’ve been free there since the eleventh,’ Reinach said. ‘They simply hung out flags and sang “La Marseillaise”, and got away with it.’

The news stirred the men of Rolandpoint to demand their weapons back. If resistance were possible in the south, they argued, then it should be possible in the Côte d’Or. For many in Néry the invasion had been set up to liberate not France but Néry, and more young men dug out their fathers’ equipment from the other war and disappeared towards the fighting.

‘If we don’t do something soon,’ Reinach said, ‘we shall have no young men left.’

‘Wait,’ Neville insisted. ‘For God’s sake, wait! When you move it’s got to be when they can’t call in the tanks or the Luftwaffe. Guerrilla warfare must never condense into a solid body. Clausewitz said that. He was a German, and German generals have all read him. Your time will come; every German scheme in history’s contained the seed of its own destruction.’

‘This doesn’t sound like the fair-play English,’ Ernouf growled.

‘It’s a good way to fight a war,’ Urquhart growled back.

In the atmosphere of frustration and fearful hope, the news of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Haute Vienne dropped like a bombshell. The Germans had mistaken the place for Oradour-sur-Vayres, where fighting had taken place, and the SS had swept down to shoot all the men and lock all the women and children in the church which they had then destroyed with explosives. As the people died, the village itself had been drenched with petrol and set ablaze. Six hundred and forty-three people had died and when a mass was held by the Bishop of Limoges, time bombs, planted by the Milice, had been discovered in the crypt of the cathedral.

Nobody else argued with Neville.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.