They arrived outside the church of St. Etienne at four o'clock to find the whole city insane with joy. Posters of de Gaulle flapped on every wall still standing, and the Canadians were everywhere, grinning battle-worn men who had brought cigarettes and chocolate and chloride of lime for the dead. It seemed that everyone in the world who had survived had survived for this moment. There was little Dumis, drinking tea out of a Canadian's billy-can, and assuring him that even four years of hell had been worth it for this, and prominent above the crowd outside the Lycee Malherbe were Gille and the beaming stubbly grimed face of "Third Fool." By now a crowd of many thousands had gathered in the dusty square, filthy and verminous, many in tears. Yellow dust still drifted over the city, but above, like a resurgence of hope, the sky was blue and cloudless. Tears streaming down his face, Gille raised the great shout "Vive Geneial de Gaulle" and slowly, prompt on four-thirty, fluttering in the slight breeze, the Cross of Lorraine slid towards the summit of the Lycee flagstaff, an undefeated flag raised by an undefeated network. Suddenly at that moment, all they felt came bursting through, raggedly, at first, after four years servitude: Allans, enfants de la patrie Le jour de gloire est arrive ... Then, more powerful than the guns, swelling from twenty thousand throats, the immortal thunder of the Marseillaise: Aux armes—citoyens! Formes—vos battaillons! Aux armes—aux armes Pour-la—patrie! . . . The fate of the Wall had been the fate of Jericho; their triumph was complete. And that was very nearly the end, except that three pioneers in the long struggle were still unaccounted for. About a week later, towards dusk- on 15th July, hot, dusty and dog-tired, they were dismounting from their bicycles outside a farmhouse about seventy miles west of Paris— Girard, Dany and Moulines. The farmer's wife, who reluctantly agreed to let them spend the night in the hayloft, warned them a battle was raging to the west: it would be madness to go farther. But Girard knew they must go on. Early the previous day Colonel Personne, now military head of O.C.M., had summoned Girard from the country to his headquarters in the Rue Forge Royale, Paris, and ordered him to cross the lines near St. Lo and establish contact with Renault and Dewavrin and the Civil Government in Bayeux. Girard asked permission to take Moulines and Dany with him, adding wryly that if all three got through it would be a miracle. The southern suburbs of Caen had not yet fallen and the might of eight German Panzer divisions were now massed to halt the Allied break-through to Paris. For four days, as the battle raged, they hung about the farm, not talking much, their nerves made raw by the terrifying symphony of the shells. On the fifth morning, Dany awoke in the hay to sunlight and deep silence then glancing down, she started laughing, nudging Moulines into wakeful-ness. She gurgled: "Look!" On the first few nights they had all been resting level in the hay and only on the third night had the bulky Girard slid a little to one side. Now he was sunk so far below them in his bower that he might have curled up in a separate bunk. With some of the old light-heartedness, they slithered down to him. "Hey, wake up, Monsieur Le Mince! Time for your reducing exercises!" For the next few days there seemed to be a lull in the battle, and they made good going each day, riding through glinting river valleys and tall rustling forests of oak. Some days later, at nightfall, they reached a small stone village somewhere east of Le Mans and a man in blue denims stepped from the shadows with a pistol cocked to challenge them. He turned out to be the local Resistance leader, and ironically the one place he could recommend their spending the night was the cottage of the local collaborator, a woman in her fifties who swore, shifty-eyed, that not a scrap of food or drink remained in the house. The 200,000 francs that Colonel Personne had given them, now housed in Dany's handbag, might have been unnegotiable currency. Then the woman wept noisily on Dany's shoulder, claiming that next morning the Resistants were coming to shave her head, but Dany and the others went to bed racked more by hunger than pity. It wasn't until next morning that they found the cafe opposite open and were able to break their fast. When they set out again, the going was tougher. The road was dusty and pot-holed, winding slowly uphill through wooded gorges, and soon the shells were screaming over them again as the great break-through of General Patton's Third Army gathered momentum. Then with a jolting, teeth-gritting jar, Dany's rear tyre went. Precious minutes passed as she bent to mend the puncture, then they were riding for dear life, Girard's heavy frame streaming with sweat, coiled up until his chin almost nudged the handlebars. Five minutes, ten, with the barbaric wail of shells as background music, then the telltale jarring: Dany's tyre again. She was down in the grit, the sweat matting her hair in the sticky sunlight, and Moulines was shouting, "Ride on the rim, Dany, the fire's coming nearer." Dany went on until the job was done, but fifty yards on they heard from her again—a moan of anguish. "Marcel—my handbag! " Girard felt his heart lurch. "Well ?". "All our money—I hung it on the back of the chair at breakfast. I must have left it there." Girard closed his eyes in mute appeal. "This," he said softly, "is the end." Then to his horror, he saw Moulines swing his machine round, crouching low over the handlebars. "Jacques," he bellowed. "Come back." But the only answer was a distant "Don't worry. I'll get it," as Moulines went catapulting away down the hill like a toboggan down the Cresta Run. The earth shuddered with the guns now; a shell burst not 200 yards from where he rode. Minutes passed and the guns pounded. Dany and Girard crouched miserably in the green underwater light of the trees. The agony of suspense was so strong now that neither of them felt like talking. Then the young count was back, riding cheerfully up the hill as if he did this every day of the week, the bag draped over his handlebars. They hugged him as if they had not seen one another for years. By mid-afternoon they had headed off into the forests somewhere south and west of Mayenne. Once a band of Germans passed them, doubling through the pools of sunlight that dappled the beech trunks, but they had no time to worry about three grimy French stragglers wheeling bicycles. Suddenly they heard from Dany again: "Marcel!" "What now?" said Girard wearily. "We are in the Allied lines. Look at the cigarettes!" "Explain," Girard ground out. And Dany, with the wisdom of a woman who had known four years of privation, answered: "Only Allied soldiers could afford to throw away cigarettes half-smoked, mon cher. Look and see." Girard bent to examine them and saw that she was right. He picked up a handful and saw that they were American cigarettes, all brands, before tossing them down again. All except one whose trade name suggested that uncanny stroke of luck which Century had so often enjoyed. He lit that one, leaning against a tree in the sunlight, and smoked it to the end. More follows, Regards, Pat
EPILOGUE Century network survives to-day [1958] as a memory of old glory and courage. In Caen and a few other towns along the Wall there is still an annual reunion in a cafe, a group resurrecting old fears and friendships over wine and black tobacco. But each year a few more faces are missing from the board because death or distance or the business of wringing a livelihood from a hard world has removed them from the scene. Some of the survivors, in any case, live barely a cycle ride from the Wall, and the memories, all the year round, are inescapable. The long Atlantic Wall is not very much of a Wall in these days. In the American sector, Utah Beach and the tawny crescent of Omaha retain a few, a very few, crumbling concrete structures to testify Hitler's dream of sealing off Europe from Allied retribution. A few strongpoints likewise remain in the British sector near Ouistreham but the salt water is slowly rotting the last of the "Mulberries" at Arromanches. When the tide goes out at Port-en-Bessein, a few objects once more lethal than rocks lie rusting in the seaweed by the harbour wall—a steel picket, the uprights of a Belgian gate. But that is all. The gulls cry above the shingle and the grass and sand have crept in. Only history can assess how many British and American lives were saved on D-Day by Century's vigil. A senior officer close to the planning once summed it up to me in this way: "The Channel was a gulf and even the best aerial photography couldn't quite bridge it. It involved a bit of 'hunching' in the interpretation and it lacked the range and mobility of the living eye. If you couldn't be there on the spot, seeing, the next best thing was to have eyes there doing it for you." So perhaps history's verdict will be that the eyes of Century missed little that was worth seeing. When it was all over, Major-General Walter Bedell Smith, SHAEF Chief of Staff, wrote warmly to de Gaulle's Minister of Information, Jacques Soustelle: "Without the networks of the French Resistance, the invasion would not have been possible." Eisenhower, too, added his tribute: in the field, he said, the work of units like Gille's had been worth fifteen divisions to him. Glory is a small reward for those who died loving life, though Girard's agents won their full share of that. In the invasion sector alone, the thousand-odd survivors won, between them, more than 2500 decorations and awards for valour. But their greatest reward has been the chance to live and ply their trades peacefully in the towns where most of them were born. Any visitor to Caen will find Dumis still keeping the principal garage, Arsene still the master plumber, Madame Vauclin among the most respected of the town's good wives. Both Dumis and Arsene, for their exploits, won the Croix de Guerre twice, but few of their neighbors’ know that. Madame Vauclin, like big Jean Chateau who died recently, was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, but the most prized of all her possessions is the citation she received from Lord Alanbrooke for the dispatch of twenty-two pigeons. She has framed that, and it occupies a place of honour in her sitting-room. Meslin is dead. Two years after Caen was liberated, the strain and illness finally broke him, and he never lived to see the port that he loved rebuilt. Little Jeanne Verinaud works for the new Government engineer now, and the old Underwood typewriter that typed so many of Century's dispatches, though honourably retired, remains a treasured souvenir. Often, as she walks home in the evening, she chooses the route along the south bank of the river. It has been re-christened "Quay Eugene Meslin," and the blue enamel plaque is there for all to see. Duchez, too, is dead, worn out by the rigours of his un-forgettable and unorthodox war. He died a few years after Odette's return from Mauthausen in the autumn of 1945. Odette—now a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour—is still in Caen, running her own small business, but sometimes she finds it hard to believe that Duchez has gone. His portrait stills grins from the dresser in the parlour, with the old lovable rascality, and for the benefit of his children the tokens of his courage are carefully preserved in a special drawer.The Poles honoured him, the Americans awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the highest honour a civilian can attain, and the French gave him not only the Medal of the Resistance but the Croix de Guerre. It is the words of this last citation that Odette feels sum it all up best: Rene Duchez, Commandant of the Deuxieme Bureau of Sub-division m.i. A model of tenacity and Lorraine patriotism. For two years he relentlessly pursued the battle against the enemy, despite the sacrifice of his family and of all his worldly goods. Thomas was reunited with his family at the war's end. Now married, with a small and lively son, christened Hubert, who shows signs of inheriting Papa's artistic talent, he has become a Government draughtsman, designing blueprints for rather more peaceful ends. Sometimes at week-ends, he sees Girard at the Gare Centrale, travelling back to Paris on Sunday, and, as always Girard slaps him on the back in passing and booms: "Ah! Thomas, mon petit, those maps were wonderful—wonderful." And Thomas feels just as bucked as he did in the old days. Girard, of course, married Dany. They have built a small house on a hill north of Caen, looking out over a new city rising from the ruins, and Girard has installed a bowling alley and a rose garden and a tank of tropical fish, being more addicted to these pursuits, with the aid of a glass of wine, or to fishing with his gargantuan friend Wilfrid Torres, than spiriting top-secret plans from under the noses of the Gestapo. Ask him if he'd do it all again and he scowls broodingly at you for a moment, before relaxing with a wink, and answering, "Well, I am on the Reserve." Sometimes, but not often, he sees Gille, for the advocate's social life is busier than Girard can face up to these days. Gille married Janine and entered politics, being now President of the Council-General of Calvados, and were you to attend one of his discreetly memorable dinner parties you would hardly believe that your host once scaled a stone wall with the S.S. baying at his heels or that your hostess was decorated for saving the lives, under penalty of death, of sixty-two aviators. Such thoughts would not really spring to mind on meeting anyone in the Century saga. Certainly not if you saw Dr. Sustendal on his way to visit a patient along the sea front at Luc-sur-Mer, or met Maury or Farine or Mercader, businessmen all, or saw Cardron returning from the day's fishing at Port-en-Bessein. With Moulines, perhaps, for although he is happily married and a proud father, his old restless temperament has sent him crop-dusting in, of all places, Morocco. But not with Colonel Personne (Monsieur Piette), one of the wittiest speakers in the Chamber of Deputies, or with Renault, that good and gentle man, who lives with his family in a little villa high above the Mediterranean at Lisbon and has become a successful writer on his own account. And Dewavrin? It was he, after all, who began it, and with him you are less sure. Now a banker, he has given up the Army, though he still answers readily to the title "Colonel Passy." As ever, he seems deceptively mild and scholarly, but now and again, when controversy is in the air, the lips set in a taut line, the blue eyes blaze, and all the old obstinacy shows through, just as in the days when he fought to establish the network in Normandy. But on one subject he is humble, and that is when you pay tribute to his courage and vision in setting in motion one of the greatest intelligence triumphs of the war. "No, no," he says, "it was them that you've got to write about because they had the faith—very much like the Bible, you know, and what Paul said to the Hebrews. He was talking about Abraham and Noah and the others and he called faith 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.' And he said this about them, too: 'These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.'" This is the end of the book 'Ten Thousand Eyes' written in 1958 by Richard Collier and published by Corgi Books. Regards, Pat