CHAPTER EIGHT
Prisoners
AS A very small boy, riding on the broad platform of La Fumée’s back had been André’s delight. But La Fumée had not then quivered at the whine and roar of shells, or the nerve-shaking rattle of machine guns. And the fields had not been spiked with wicked barbed-wire glider traps.
“Now, we zigzag,” explained Victor as he turned the mare into a hedge-lined path at the next field. It was necessary to round barns and ponds and areas marked in German: “Achtung—Minen!” “Beware—Mines!” to avoid even the smaller country roads.
They covered nearly a mile at the Percheron’s steady plod. Then a shell crashed a hundred yards away, and the horse cowered under a shower of falling debris. Victor and André had flattened themselves on the Percheron’s vast back. With his head still buried in Victor’s rough coat, André begged, “Surely it is wiser to turn back, Victor.”
The old man sighed. “But it is now such a little way. It is a pity.”
Both sat up cautiously.
The marshes glowed beyond a broken orchard, just across the Paris-Cherbourg road. Far to the northeast, from a German pillbox sunk beside the flooded land, swiveled guns thumped, and were immediately answered by other, unseen guns.
Before they could move again, André cried, “Listen!”
A tremendous explosion, close to the sea, was followed by a shattering series of rolling reverberations. And immediately, from almost on the horizon, a fleet of planes swept upward sharply over their heads.