Suddenly he saw that they were parachutes!
And below nearly every one, a soldier swung. From the lowest he could make out the jut of rifles.
CHAPTER FIVE
André’s Warning
CLINGING to his uncertain perch, for the first few seconds André felt stunned. Could this be his own Normandy sky? He watched the flicker of moonlight here and there on the parachutes drifting down through the scudding clouds.
“The Invasion!” he thought.
He had turned to stare across at his father’s barn in the distance, wondering about the Nazi machine gunners, when the tree beside him was torn by a crashing of branches. His heart leaped into his throat. The topmost branches were entwined by a great, pale, crumpled parachute. And, dangling from the shroud lines, hung a figure that swung like a pendulum.
In the meadow beyond, other dark shapes were pelting into the hayfield, their chutes collapsing around them like punctured balloons.
The noise was spreading. Isolated shots and short bursts of machine-gun fire drummed, stopped, and drummed again. From the far-off German camp near Ste. Mère came the wail of a Klaxon horn. And there was the distant growl and whine of speeding motors. The echo of distant explosions increased.
High overhead, planes whose cargo had been dropped, droned away toward England. And everywhere antiaircraft fire was spitting even more frantically.
Who were these men dangling from parachutes? If they had started the Invasion, all Maquis ought to help them. “Then that means me, too,” André thought.