Clash by Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

to keep her in the dark about this.”  
    “Fine. The fewer people who know at this point the better. But she’s no friend of the Germans, Alain, you have to know that.”  
    “If she isn’t working against them she is!” he replied fiercely, pounding his fist on the table. “One collaborator in this house is enough!”
    Laura bit her lip and looked away. Alain couldn’t understand his father’s motivation; he saw fear only as a hindering weakness to be dealt with and overcome, like a sprained ankle or an injured hand. Feeling it was unavoidable but surrendering to it was inconceivable.
    “You’d better go,” Laura said.
    He stood and embraced her. “Anything I can do,” Laura said, smoothing his unruly hair, so like his brother’s. “Anything.”
    When Alain held her a little too long she stepped back, and he released her, his eyes meeting hers, then drifting away.
    “Be careful,” she added.
    “I will.”
    Alain slipped out the back door and ran across the open field between his house and his neighbor’s barn. He tapped on the door, and it was opened by Curel, the hero of the Somme, who waited for him to step inside before throwing the wooden bolt on the door.
    Alain looked around him. In the glow of the oil lamps suspended from the oak beams overhead he could see Langtot, the farmer, and the Thibeau boys who worked at the factory with him. A year apart, they were enough alike to be twins, and wore identical expressions: scared, hopeful, determined. They looked the way he felt.
    “Welcome, Alain,” Curel said quietly at his back. “I think we have some work to do.”  
    Alain turned to him and smiled.  
    And in this way all over France that summer, in hamlets like Fains-les-Sources and in big cities, from the chateaux of the Loire valley to the shepherd’s huts of the Auvergne, the Résistance was born.

 
    Chapter 2
     
    August humidity blanketed Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in torpid, windless heat as Captain Daniel Patrick Harris, USMC, crossed the camp’s central common and tossed away his cigarette. It was a muggy, overcast day, threatening the relief of rain which never seemed to materialize. Harris pulled his uniform blouse, which stuck wetly to his backbone, away from his body and glanced at his companion.
    “Another fight last night in the mess,” he said. “The stockade is already so full it looks like the hog pen at the county fair. If this weather doesn’t break soon we’re going to be locking up everybody in uniform in North Carolina.”
    “Ah, they’re just jumpy, antsy. We keep waiting for something to happen and nothing ever does,” the other man, a second lieutenant named Gamble, answered. “What do you think this is all about?” he added, nodding toward the clapboard building they were approaching.  
    They walked up the steps and filed into the designated meeting room with about eighty of their colleagues. They’d been called to assemble that morning, and speculation was rife about the reason for such an impromptu gathering, which was an unusual event.  
    Harris shrugged. “Maybe the Krauts declared war on us overnight and Forrest is going to give us the good news.”  
    Gamble grinned. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said, familiar with his friend’s restlessness. “I hate to disappoint you but I heard Forrest needs a new driver for his staff car. They’re probably going to announce a lottery for the job.”
    “No chance. Too late for you, Gamble. They’ve got some butt kissing corporal already picked out for that cushy spot,” Harris replied dryly.
    Gamble continued to smile as they found seats at the back of the room while the rest of the men milled around, talking, laughing, exchanging information. Harris folded his arms on his chest and stretched his long legs in front of him. His eyes roamed the gray institutional walls, unrelieved except by the occasional presence of notices tacked at eye level. A small podium faced the rows of folding