guts. I can't say that I blamed him.
It seemed like hours, though it could have been no more than a few
minutes later, when the sergeant in the lead boat held up his arm and
signaled for us to stop. Not that I could really see his arm even with
my augmented retinas; it was only a shade of blackness somehow slightly
distinguishable from the other shades of blackness along the river.
We slowed in midstream and carefully turned our boats toward the shore,
up to the marshy ground, in close to the trees that grew on the water's
edge. And there we stopped and waited, silent, hardly breathing, listening
to the distant sounds of war and the closer sounds of German sentries
marching along the edge of the river.
Then there were two soft, watery sounds, not quite splashes, more like the
sound of two heavy bodies slowly lowering themselves into the river, down
under the water. There was silence as the sergeant and one of the privates
swam underwater up to where the first set of cables lay across the river.
There was nothing to do but wait and wish for a cigarette and know that I
couldn't smoke one and then chew on my lip and recite an old Greek poem
my father had taught me and think about women and wonder what was going
to happen when we finally did get to the villa -- though that sort of
thing, long experience had taught me, was a complete waste of time. I'd do
whatever I had to do when the time came, and that's all there was to it.
We were still a mile or two from Beaugency and the two bridges that
spanned the Loire there, if they were still in,tact, and aerial
photographs hadn't been too clear about one of them; it might be half
lying in the water for all we knew.
Beaugency was an old town, I understood, or rather the name was old.
The present town was relatively new, for this part of France, having been
built from the ground up around the turn of the nineteenth century.
The earlier city by that name had been a few miles farther up the river
but had been burned during the Peasants' Rebellion in the late 1700's
that tried to overthrow the French monarchy and had very nearly succeeded
before the British stepped in on the side of the royalist defenders of
the crown and helped put down the rebellion with the same deadly Ferguson
breechloaders that had stopped the American rebels two decades before.
The old Beaugency had been a stronghold of the rebels during the last
stages of the rebellion. When their main forces had been crushed by the
royalists and their British allies, the shattered armies had somehow
converged on the Touraine and finally retreated into Beaugency. It was
the last major rebel fortress to fall and the angry, victorious king had
ordered that the city, like Carthage nearly two thousand years before,
be leveled and salt sown upon the earth where it had stood.
The survivors of Beaugency, those who weren't beheaded or hanged under
the king's eyes, were allowed to settle along the river a few miles from
the spot where the old city had been. The new Beaugency had gradually
grown up there -- and that is the city toward which we moved or had been
moving before we had stopped to wait for the cutting of the cables.
All this is of absolutely no importance, of course. It was just one of
the bits of information I had picked up while we sat in the trenches
during the long, cold winter.
At last we heard the movement of water again, the soft splashing of
careful, highly trained swimmers returning to their boat. Again I saw
the sergeant, once he had got his dripping body back into the boat,
give me a hand signal; this one for us to follow.
Back out into the river we rowed, though not as far from the shore as
we had been before. From here on we would have to do our best to avoid
being seen, though I doubted that very many Germans were peering down
into the river that night. There was too much going on to the east for
them to worry much about the river.
After a while we passed the
It seemed like hours, though it could have been no more than a few
minutes later, when the sergeant in the lead boat held up his arm and
signaled for us to stop. Not that I could really see his arm even with
my augmented retinas; it was only a shade of blackness somehow slightly
distinguishable from the other shades of blackness along the river.
We slowed in midstream and carefully turned our boats toward the shore,
up to the marshy ground, in close to the trees that grew on the water's
edge. And there we stopped and waited, silent, hardly breathing, listening
to the distant sounds of war and the closer sounds of German sentries
marching along the edge of the river.
Then there were two soft, watery sounds, not quite splashes, more like the
sound of two heavy bodies slowly lowering themselves into the river, down
under the water. There was silence as the sergeant and one of the privates
swam underwater up to where the first set of cables lay across the river.
There was nothing to do but wait and wish for a cigarette and know that I
couldn't smoke one and then chew on my lip and recite an old Greek poem
my father had taught me and think about women and wonder what was going
to happen when we finally did get to the villa -- though that sort of
thing, long experience had taught me, was a complete waste of time. I'd do
whatever I had to do when the time came, and that's all there was to it.
We were still a mile or two from Beaugency and the two bridges that
spanned the Loire there, if they were still in,tact, and aerial
photographs hadn't been too clear about one of them; it might be half
lying in the water for all we knew.
Beaugency was an old town, I understood, or rather the name was old.
The present town was relatively new, for this part of France, having been
built from the ground up around the turn of the nineteenth century.
The earlier city by that name had been a few miles farther up the river
but had been burned during the Peasants' Rebellion in the late 1700's
that tried to overthrow the French monarchy and had very nearly succeeded
before the British stepped in on the side of the royalist defenders of
the crown and helped put down the rebellion with the same deadly Ferguson
breechloaders that had stopped the American rebels two decades before.
The old Beaugency had been a stronghold of the rebels during the last
stages of the rebellion. When their main forces had been crushed by the
royalists and their British allies, the shattered armies had somehow
converged on the Touraine and finally retreated into Beaugency. It was
the last major rebel fortress to fall and the angry, victorious king had
ordered that the city, like Carthage nearly two thousand years before,
be leveled and salt sown upon the earth where it had stood.
The survivors of Beaugency, those who weren't beheaded or hanged under
the king's eyes, were allowed to settle along the river a few miles from
the spot where the old city had been. The new Beaugency had gradually
grown up there -- and that is the city toward which we moved or had been
moving before we had stopped to wait for the cutting of the cables.
All this is of absolutely no importance, of course. It was just one of
the bits of information I had picked up while we sat in the trenches
during the long, cold winter.
At last we heard the movement of water again, the soft splashing of
careful, highly trained swimmers returning to their boat. Again I saw
the sergeant, once he had got his dripping body back into the boat,
give me a hand signal; this one for us to follow.
Back out into the river we rowed, though not as far from the shore as
we had been before. From here on we would have to do our best to avoid
being seen, though I doubted that very many Germans were peering down
into the river that night. There was too much going on to the east for
them to worry much about the river.
After a while we passed the
Similar Books
