At a signal from the driver he went to the pump
Pierre Gagnon listened carefully, then swung around and went back to the girl in the doorway.
“Marie,” he whispered, “they want us to hide this fellow, another downed flyer, for two or three days.”
The girl studied the youth slumped low in the front seat. She thought, “He looks like all the airmen who are shot down over France—the worried eyes, the peasant clothes that don’t fit, the bandages.”
“Who is the driver?” she asked. “Has he the right password?”
“Yes,” her father replied. “And he asks us to hide this English pilot till the Maquis can find a way to get him over the border into Spain. Do you think we can do it?”
In Normandy, that part of France which thrusts northward into the English Channel, apple trees were in bloom. Warm, soft breezes played across the green fields, over the thick hedgerows, and through the orchards.
But in this beautiful spring of 1944 the people of Normandy could not enjoy what they saw. They could only hear the tramp of German boots over their land. Nazi armies had occupied France, and for the last two years German camps had been set up over the countryside. French property had been seized, and Nazi officers told the people exactly what they could and could not do.