Kid Comes Back Read Online Free PDF

turn arrived. Messages as a rule were unwritten; if written, they were placed in cigarette papers so they could be swallowed if necessary. Sometimes they were carried in bicycle tires or the lining of a man’s necktie. Occasionally the messengers were women, and they heard of women who journeyed for miles by bicycle in mid-winter storms with messages. These messages were delivered to a friendly house in each town called a letter box. When discovered by the Germans, the people in the house were promptly shot, and the property burned to the ground. The letter box was then said to have been destroyed, and a new one had to be set up. This often meant a delay of several weeks.
    A dozen, a hundred times a day during their sojourn in Floreac, Roy wished he had studied French at school, or at least tried to learn some words and phrases in the long months in North Africa and Corsica. Often he listened to conversations between Jim and Marcel, conducted partly in bad French, partly in bad English. Lucien Jacques and his wife frequently came up at night to join them. Slowly Roy realized what it was, this Resistance. And these Resisters. He learned of the children in school, so underfed that if sent to the blackboard they could not stand. These people, these pale, undernourished folk, did not look at all like heroes, but they were heroes. They risked their lives all day every day, they and thousands all over France.
    There was Marcel’s sister who thought it was fun to stand on the platforms of buses in Bordeaux and slip anti-German pamphlets in the pockets of enemy officers. Or his friend, the telephone clerk in Lyon, who went out regularly after curfew when it was death to be caught by a German patrol, to cut wires. Or the local postmaster, a wounded war veteran, who invariably managed to get his crutches entangled with officers’ legs in the cafés; or the nephew of Lucien Jacques, a farm boy of twelve, who gave an armored column the wrong directions and sent them forty miles out of their way in the dark. Then there was the butcher in Floreac who had an argument with a German, lost his temper, and ended up by throwing the man into his refrigerator. No traces of the soldier were ever found, though everyone in town knew perfectly well what had happened.
    Occasionally they got a small sheet of flimsy tissue paper, one of the Resistance newspapers called Combat , or Libération. Then Marcel would lie on his back translating the news laboriously. Through one of these sheets they learned that IT was approaching. IT was the landing, the famous landing, the landing promised the French for three years, and so long deferred, so long awaited, the moment for which the French, so many times deceived, hardly dared hope. One night, when they were listening to the radio which Marcel had carried along, with Madame Lucien Jacques at the window watching for German patrols in the street, a message came that sent the three French into ecstasy.
    They suddenly jumped, half-shouting, talking excitedly together, all of them. Lucien Jacques immediately disappeared down the trap door to the ground floor. For some time the Americans were unable to understand what had happened. Then it became clear. The message had come from the B.B.C. in London, the message all France had waited for so many years.
    Only six words. “The fairy has a lovely smile.” Yet to the men and women of the Resistance it meant everything. Hold yourself in readiness; IT is at hand. Invasion! Release! Freedom is near. Lucien Jacques soon appeared at the trap door of the attic with a bottle and glasses in his hands. He held out the glasses to Marcel. That night the three French and the two Americans drank the last bottle of champagne left in the house.
    They were cheered, all of them, knowing that deliverance was close. Roy, especially, felt happy. The pain in his leg and thigh was less severe. As the doctor predicted, the rest had helped. The pain returned sometimes, as when he knelt too