A Troubled Peace by L. M. Elliott Read Free Book Online Page B

that, but he’d just fibbed instead, saying no, there wasn’t. Truth be known, he did think often of Claudette. He’d stopped her from attacking the accused girl and sacrificed himself to save Claudette from being captured, and these were the only actions he was proud of during his run for freedom. Had Claudette knifed the girl, Claudette would have become as pitiless as the Gestapo—she’d be ruined. Henry thought back to the old German sergeant who had let him go. That kind of mercy, that kind of respect for life, was needed now to restore peace, to rebuild.
    But maybe that was easier said than done here, where people had been tormented daily, starved, and set uponone another by the Nazis like in a cockfight—neighbors denouncing one another for revenge, for bread, to save their own skin, to be rid of people they thought troublesome or annoying or racially inferior. Given the suspicions, the residual and justified anger still smoldering in France, it would take real courage to stand up to a mob bent on revenge. Henry could see that their hatred would easily turn on anyone disagreeing or arguing against them.
    Â 
    At Valence, the turbaned girl jumped to the ground before the train pulled to a complete stop. She hurried through the station. Henry was glad to see her slip away safely. No one noticed her because there was a huge commotion along the tracks. People had surrounded a horse-drawn grocery wagon. They were waving sticks, brooms, umbrellas, and shouting.
    â€œDu beurre!” a man from the crowd called into the train. The cart had butter in it. The food ministry had ordered it shipped to Paris, to be sold there. The mob was trying to stop it. “C’est notre beurre! Venez! Aidez-nous!”
    The man’s cries sparked a small riot. Henry was knocked about by passengers shouting and pushing to the exit. They rushed to the butter cart, shrieking at the driver to sell the butter to them, rather than loading it onto the train for Paris.
    â€œMoi!” They shoved and elbowed one another to be first. “Moi d’abord!” There was a madness among the people, a desperation that sickened Henry.
    For butter.
    He waded through the crowd and hurried to the edge of the train station to get his bearings. Far in the distance, on the eastern horizon, rose a long jagged shadow, the purple-gray outline of the Vercors’s mountains and the pre-Alps behind them. Henry caught his breath with relief. Toward the hills, there would be space. Toward the hills, he would be free of the smells, the panic bred by hungry people crammed too close together, squabbling over the same scrap of food.
    Henry had faith in the countryside, faith in good land providing hope and sustenance, faith that a people fed would be more merciful to one another, faith that in the hills that kissed the clouds, he would find Pierre.
    Henry shouldered his bag and walked away from the chaos the war had left in its wake.

C HAPTER E IGHT
    â€œ M archez !”
    Henry remembered the first night—a year and a treacherous journey ago—that the maquis set him along its ratline. No instructions other than turn left at a fork. Walk. Someone would pick him up. Who? Where? How will I know him?
    Walk . That was all the gruff maquis fighter would answer.
    Henry had walked through the night, his only companions moonlight and fear. He’d threaded his way along a two-foot-slim path of stones scratched into the white cliffs, so high they felt more part of the sky than of the earth. One false step and he’d have plummeted hundreds of feet, the only thing to catch him a forest of firs a parachute drop below.
    Walk.
    He’d made it down the crags into a valley of meadows, and crept through a slumbering village, barely breathing for fear of waking a dog that would howl an alarm. He had jumped back in terror from a poster of a German soldier, his nerves so raw he mistook the image for a person. Continuing, he made it