??”
He falls silent at the sound of engines. Engines and clanking treads.
The first vehicles to appear are two motorcycles with sidecars, followed by a line of half-tracks and trucks. Rainy watches from her concealment, dutifully noting details: the stenciled numbers on the sides of half-tracks, the condition of the vehicles, the mood—insofar as it is possible to guess based on smiling versus worried faces.
Definitely Waffen SS, she notes with satisfaction. She has found part of the Das Reich division. Just a column, but it may yield greater finds.
Coming up last, trailing the column, is an open staff car. An SS sturmbannführer, the equivalent of a major (Marie’s alleged castle-owning Nazi?), is the main occupant. He’s a whippet-thin, good-looking, youngish man with a wide grin who wears his cap at a rakish angle.
Philippe breathes, “That is Adolf Diekmann, ambitious and vicious.”
Rainy stares intently at the SS officer. The enemy. What goes on inside a mind like that? What turns a handsome man, a man who by the look of him had every privilege, into a Nazi? The question seems to have new urgency now.
Moving through the woods they keep pace with the column, which is moving in fits and starts, thanks to an overturned hay wagon blocking a small bridge. Just beyond the bridge is an intersection. And that is when Philippe urgently grabs Rainy’s arm.
“What is it?”
“The road they’re taking . . .”
“Yes?”
“It goes to my village. It goes to Oradour.”
16
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—ORADOUR-SUR-GLANE, FRANCE
They run through the woods, tripping, faces whipped by low branches, gasping for air, Bernard leading the way. The path through the woods is shorter than the road, but they are not half-tracks, they cannot run at thirty or forty miles an hour. By the time they arrive, panting like racehorses, the Germans are drawn up at the edge of town.
Bernard, without a word of explanation, ducks through a bush and disappears out the other side.
“He’s going to see the excitement,” Philippe says. “Most likely the Germans are conducting a search. Perhaps for maquis, but there are no maquis in Oradour, there never have been!”
Philippe leads them to a spot in the woods just beside the river, which in this area is thickly overgrown on both banks. “Are you afraid of heights?”
Rainy shakes her head no, and Philippe begins climbing a tree with the ease of familiarity. Rainy joins him thirty feet up, resting in a crotch between branches, with Philippe standing on the branch and shading his eyes. The sun is high and very hot.
Oradour looks like any number of villages Rainy saw in Italy, a village of stone houses beside matching stone shops, all intermingled so the school for girls is beside a garage, and a café might be cheek by jowl with a barrel-maker. Most of the town extends just a few blocks along a single street. Newish tram tracks glow in the sun. An ancient church anchors the end of town nearest the river, farthest from where the Germans are forming up.
There are people in the street, children playing, mothers carrying babies, an old woman scolding a little girl, a young couple walking arm in arm, an old man pushing a wheelbarrow, a line of mostly men at the tobacconist.
“It’s tobacco ration day,” Philippe observes. “This may be an advantage. After the Boche search and go away, we will be safe going into town to buy food. And I can visit my parents.”
“Shouldn’t a search be done by milice? Or at least garrison troops? Those are Waffen SS panzergrenadiers.”
Philippe has no answer. Then, voice dropping in worry, he says, “They’re sending out flankers. I think . . . they’re encircling the village.”
Rainy’s heart sinks. If the SS throw up a cordon around the town, they may well come right through this spot. They stay silent, hugging the tree trunk, grateful for the spring foliage that is their camouflage. Soon they hear spoken German, laughing and loud tramping. The SS cordon is forming behind them, at least five hundred feet back. They relax their postures slightly but keep to the lowest of whispers.
“Do you see them?” Rainy says. She rises cautiously, turns carefully, holding on to branches lest her rag-shoes slip. She catches a glimpse of a uniform. Maybe it’s more like three hundred feet.
“Look!” Philippe hisses, pointing.
Rainy sees a file of German troops now advancing at a quick walk into town, jaunty on the downhill slope. The residents stop and stare but don’t seem overly afraid. One of the soldiers ducks into a pastry shop and emerges with a fistful of brioches. A playful tussle breaks out as fellow soldiers try to grab one.
Now come the sounds of Germans shouting orders, some in the German tongue, some in hard-edged French. They are ordering the residents to gather on the fairground so they can search the village. The term fairground is perhaps a bit grand for the space involved, which Rainy can see only as a bright, narrow wedge between rooftops.
“Normal when a village is searched,” Philippe says, but he sounds as if he’s trying to make himself believe it.