In movies and on television you sometimes see a tough American paratrooper knock out a German guard with a devastating karate chop or a swift judo throw. You will find none of that in this story. The closest any German ever came to me was when he was poking his submachine gun in my stomach as I sat trapped in a car. No karate or judo expert could have gotten out of that fix. I had to do it differently.
There are no great victories either. If anything, it was the other way around. Once I led a Maquis group and tried to punch a hole through the rear of the "Atlantic Wall" defenses on the Brittany coast. My group was made up of untrained young Frenchmen and some former Senegalese and Algerian soldiers. The Germans let me lead my men forward into a trap. Then they opened up on us; the Senegalese and Algerians panicked and ran. My young Frenchmen stood fast, but they took a beating. I had made a tactical error for which others paid the price. We were well clobbered that morning.
The people I knew in the Maquis were for the most part plain people, farmers, storekeepers, priests, mechanics, gendarmes, ex-soldiers, very young men and very old men, and the women. There was a butcher and a veterinarian, and both of them were shot by the Germans for helping us. There was also an elderly aristocrat in whose chateau I spent a night between sheets for the first time in months. I remember that he suggested that I keep my pistol at hand on the bedside table, and I did.
As guerrilla fighters most of these people in our area of Brittany were half-trained at best. But they all had courage, sometimes reckless courage. They also had faith in themselves and in France, and they were sure that at last the long night of Nazi tyranny was ending.
When I told a friend of mine that I was going to try to write this story he smiled a little and replied that if I did it would be because I wanted to re-live the war days and that evidently I missed the adventures, the hopes and fears, the camaraderie, the sense of achievement, and also the conviction, beyond any doubt, of having a cause. He said that perhaps I had a nostalgic feeling for what was and now is not, and that I would be writing to please myself. My friend is unusually perceptive, sometimes uncomfortably so. What he said may well be true and perhaps I am really writing for myself. But then it has been said that a writer should first of all try to please and satisfy himself, and that he should think of himself as playing to an audience of one. And yet here something else should be mentioned: the story which I tell is, in some ways, the story of a failure.
In writing this story I realize that I now see what happened in 1944 through the mellowing filter of time, and that I, the writer, am no longer the same person who jumped into France.· Some of the things I saw have acquired a richer meaning which I then saw only dimly, if at all. Time is a kind friend in those lonely hours when you start dredging up a part of your life, and the past becomes a constant companion, a sad one at times and a gay one at others, but always someone who is at your side and is, indeed, part of you.
Sometimes when I was asked after the war what it was like to be behind the lines and what I did, I would be reminded of the old story of the French nobleman who was asked what he had done during the French Revolution. And his reply was, "I survived."
