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have arrived at the marriage. That means they know in London that we’ve delivered our cargo safely.”

CHAPTER 6
    R OY AND J IM LAY on bumpy straw mattresses on the floor of the garret of the small two-story house, peering by day through a shuttered window onto the street, listening at night to the hobnailed boots of the enemy patrols passing every hour. This was their sole connection with the life of the outside world. For they were forbidden to go outdoors—even in the garden which was in the rear of the house—by day or by night. Most of the time, Marcel lay there with them, for he, of course, was in great danger, too.
    They had come to Floreac in a high-wheeled peasant cart drawn by two horses, carrying a cow to the local slaughterhouse. Each was dressed as a farm hand in a dingy smock, wooden sabots on his feet, and a beret. On the road they passed a dozen German patrols, the “Green Coats,” as Marcel termed them disdainfully. He was without his machine gun, which he called his “sulphur sprayer,” explaining that it was about the same size as the sprayers used to dust the vineyards of the locality during the season. Driving this cart through town, they had delivered the cow, after which Marcel had led them to a small bar in the neighboring square. Inside was a single customer, a man sitting at a table with a newspaper in his hand, who did not look at them. After a while he clicked a coin against the marble-topped table, summoned the ancient waiter, paid for his drink and departed. In five minutes they got up and left, too. Roy was amazed to find that the man was only a block away. He sauntered down a street, and they followed him at some distance. Along several back streets, through an alley, into a doorway in a garden wall, and so into the home of one of the inhabitants of Floreac. The first station on their journey.
    The owner of the house was called Lucien Jacques. Whether that was his real name or his name in the Resistance, they never discovered. He was not called Monsieur Jacques, or Lucien, but always Lucien Jacques. He was an instructor or teacher in the local school, a tallish man, half bald, thin like everyone they met, with a queer, gray-colored face. His wife, small, active, also gray-faced and thin, cooked meals for all four men from the tiny rations at her disposal, made a somewhat unappetizing soup and baked strange-looking bread. Occasionally also there was a tasteless vegetable called rutabaga, almost too tough to eat. During their stay of several weeks they did not look forward to meals in the home of Lucien Jacques.
    During that time, however, they learned through their hosts, and thanks to Marcel’s growing knowledge of English, something about the Resistance. Outside France, in the American Army, everyone talked about the Underground. Inside France, as they soon discovered, it was called the Resistance. One is in the Resistance, one makes the Resistance, one is a Resister. There were, in the Resistance, two kinds of people—the hard and the soft. That is, those who were tough and those who weren’t. The Maquis , the men who lived in the country, those they had met in the inn the night of their crash, who remained in the hills and forests of the Dordogne, fighting the Germans whenever and wherever they could, were the pure Resistance. Then there were the “legal ones,” people like Lucien Jacques and his wife, who were apparently ordinary civilians, yet were working all the time in the Resistance at home.
    They would have to wait in Floreac, they learned, for word from headquarters of the Department to start them on their journey to the coast. The business of escaping from France was not, apparently, as easy once you were inside the country as it had seemed when being briefed in the Operations Tent before a night mission. Many other downed airmen, and many French Resisters, were anxious to get out also, and everyone had to wait his turn. A message, they found, would be sent when their