In the four years spent in their dark brown room, the things that take up time in a normal life were absent: work, play, shopping, travel, amusements, promenades, visits, appointments. Instead, they read, they dreamed of life after the war, they whispered about what they remembered and loved, and they taught Jules, who as a result of this upbringing was unusually precocious. All day long, they read to him until he himself could read. Forced by circumstance and lack of choice, starting at age three, he read everything passed up through the hatch: Victor Hugo, Molière, even Voltaire, none of which he actually understood, but he loved the sound of the words. His parents taught him the rudiments of musical theory, promising that when it would be filled out with sound he would know one great day after another. Even if it were beyond his comprehension, he was nearly force-fed a child’s version of mathematics, philosophy, history, and the sad story of their lives, things young children are not normally required to learn unless compelled to by half-insane parents, or war. There was little else they could do with sixteen hours a day of enforced idleness made otherwise only by learning, talking, and dreaming. And always the drills and the crucial game, which taught Jules how instantly to stop his play and freeze in place without even putting down a foot that had been raised, except so softly he could not hear it himself. Despite what they told him, he thought that this and all the other unusual things were normal. He was happy despite his parents’ unhappiness, because he was with them, and because they loved him so much and so well. This was his world, but then, in August of 1944, it ended.
THE SPRING OF ’44 had been unusually hot and dry, and in June as the Allies fought through the hedgerows and all of France breathed expectation, the weather was unlike anything anyone had seen before. The heat beneath the copper roof in the attic was difficult to withstand. Three vents and the open window facing the garden were not enough to exhaust the air, so Philippe would open the hatch to get a convection current going. It worked so well that the column of rising air was enough to push back Cathérine’s hair when she looked down into the third-floor closet. They closed their eyes and imagined it was a sea wind. In Reims, no less than the rest of France, a heat wave arrived in August just ahead of the advancing American troops. By the time Patton’s Third Army had pressed the Germans into the city, it abated as if in deference to the expected battle.
On the 16th, the kind of immense convoys that in 1940 had carried the Germans west through Reims now flowed east in even greater volume, for, unlike as in the advance four years previously, the routes of retreat were constricted because, battered in the north, the Germans lost them there. They poured into Reims day and night in a cross between panic and military rigor. Now they didn’t merely course down the avenues, leaving only a small part of their mass to garrison the town as they pushed toward Paris, they stopped. There were so many that they had to splay into the lesser streets, which quickly filled with bumper-to-bumper military vehicles, field kitchens puffing smoke, tense and camouflaged soldiers, and defensive positions at key points replete with sandbagged revetments and emplaced anti-tank guns, the infamous 88s, pointing down the boulevards or across the squares to cover fields of fire.
The troops on the Mignons’ street looted the bakery in the first half hour, taking flour, sugar, and butter, and from then on the Mignons were unable to go out to replenish. Not much remained anywhere else anyway, except what they could beg of the bivouacked Germans. They had as much water as they needed, the heat had abated, Jacques dared not leave the house, and everyone was more or less still and waiting. At dusk when the shadows made it impossible from the street to see into the vents, Philippe looked out and reported. “There are almost a thousand German soldiers here. Trucks, half-tracks, armored cars. No tanks. We would have heard them anyway. There are four field kitchens belching smoke.” Later, the Mignons brought some German rations – potatoes and a small block of cheese – to the Lacours.
As the week passed, the troops in the street would suddenly pack up and leave, only to be replaced by a new column that choked the same space with nearly identical vehicles and equipment. The sounds of arrival and departure were always the same: straps slapping against metal, engines starting, tripods folding, the slides and bolts of weapons exercised after oiling, commands shouted, and, upon leaving, the blast of a whistle followed by the revving of engines as the vehicles rolled off. Each wave would rap on the door of the bakery and demand supplies. Told that they were gone, the corporals assigned to scavenge made forced inspections. Some wanted to check the upper floors for hidden food. This was highly suspenseful, but Marie Mignon, an honest woman of great maternal authority, would inform them that the first formation had taken everything. “We have only what you give us now,” she would say, truthfully. “Otherwise, we’d starve. We can’t move. There are three of us. We’ve hardly eaten in a week.”
Then came a pause in the retreat. Some units moved back into the city from the east, and those pouring in from the west ceased to depart. In all, twenty-five thousand infantry took up positions in and around the city. The encampment below now had another kind of energy, higher and quieter, as the soldiers made preparations for battle. Communications lines were run from newly established headquarters to numerous subsidiary commands in freshly requisitioned buildings. Chevraux de frises blocked streets bristling with 88s and machine gun revetments. Artillery battalions fell into line within range of the Marne, and what was likely a substantial proportion of the remains of the Luftwaffe, two flights of forty fighter planes apiece – or perhaps one passing over twice: no one knew – buzzed the city, as if to fool the waiting troops into false confidence.
One evening during the buildup, Louis Mignon poked his head above the hatch to confer with Philippe. Both had been at Verdun, and they feared that Reims was about to be leveled by bombing, artillery, or both. They decided that when the bombardment began the Lacours would go to the basement together with the Mignons. The Lacours would be cousins from Paris, and their papers would have been left upstairs in the rush to take shelter. Perhaps no Germans would come into the basement. Perhaps even if some did they would not query anyone as they waited out the attack. What a pity it would be if, only days before the liberation of Reims, either the Lacours would be discovered or they and the Mignons would be blown to bits, their flesh and blood mixed with that of the Germans who had driven them into hiding. Civilians who could, fled to the chalk caves beneath Reims famous for holding the major portion of the world’s aging Champagne. The Mignons – father, mother, and son – had decided that rather than abandon their guests they would live or die with them. But on Saturday, the 26th of August, the telephone lines that had just been run were re-spooled, the German generals mounted their elegant, nickel-trimmed cars and drove off before dawn, and their formations followed in the light. Reims had been so filled with men and material that it took two days and nights of steady movement to empty it. The Germans completely lost control on the 28th, and those remaining were confronted by the Resistance and an advance guard of Free French. By the evening of the 29th, American tanks were on the outskirts of the city, and would drive for the center just before sunrise on the 30th.
That morning, crowds surged through the streets and into the main squares. The Tricolor was unfurled everywhere. Jacques went out and returned, triumphant and elated, to report that there had been only minor skirmishes and few killed. It was over. Nonetheless, here and there small German units had been trapped or were lost. Some had only now arrived from the south, having made a hook after retreating from Paris. No one knew how many, but it was certain that these were very few and that they were trying to flee via inconspicuous routes before the main roads east were blocked by the Americans.