Chapter 8
Parti National Breton
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes
first; nationalism, when hate for people other than
your own comes first.
- Charles de Gaul
“He is not one of us!” Pierre Villar slammed his fist down on the table. “I will not agree to this marriage!”
Just the thought of this was blasphemy to him, and he spat on the floor.
“Papa! I am not some little girl you can scare with such nonsense! I am a grown woman, and I have my own mind!”
She stood defiantly in the doorway of their cottage. Her father glared back at her from the table.
“What do you know of him? Eh? Where does he come from? What of his family? He is a stinking fisherman who runs contraband wine. What kind of life is that?”
“He is a kind and decent man. He works hard to make a living. That should be good enough!”
“It is not! I forbid it!” he thundered.
Nothing would be settled this day, which was like so many others before. Marianne was set on seeing her Antoine; her father was determined to rid his life of this outsider. They had been through these arguments many times. The old ways are forever gone, she would try to convince him. The Great War had turned everything Villar believed upside down, and scattered the inhabitants of the tiny Breton community to the corners of France - those that did not now lie beneath its cold ground.
He was determined not to lose his daughter again. This is not over, daughter, he muttered to himself. He dared not make such a bold statement out loud. Marianne, like her mother, was a force of nature, not to be trifled with.
Marianne slammed the door after her and headed for the bakery to stoke the morning ovens.
Bouchard was a different matter, he resolved. I will have my moment, rest assured.
R
The two men sat at the cafŽ and looked suspiciously at each other. LŽon Vercher was the harbor master of Pont-Aven. Nothing moved through the small port without his knowledge, and the paperwork to clear the port could easily become bogged down. Nothing that a small favor passed quietly at the local cafŽ could not resolve. The payments were generally known among the merchants and captains, but it was something that was never spoken. It was in everyone’s interest to look away.
Today was different. Pierre Villar had breached the code of silence with Monsieur Vercher and the tension between them spilled out onto the muddy street.
“What is your intent, Monsieur Villar?” He asked suspiciously. Villar was not a wealthy man, but as the only baker in Pont-Aven he knew everybody, and everybody’s business. He could make life difficult for him.
“A simple favor, LŽon. That is all,” he slowly began. His informal tone disarmed M. Vercher somewhat, and he realized he was being manipulated into something, perhaps something he could profit from.
“A simple favor? The bite of a snake is a simple thing, Pierre.”
“Now, LŽon. There is no need to be so defensive. I am just after some simple information, that is all. Information I am prepared to compensate you for.”
“You talk boldly for a miserable baker,” he replied.
Villar noticed a change of tone, and knew he had piqued the harbor master’s interest.
“Miserable, maybe, but perhaps we can help each other a little. I don’t care about your little intrigues on the dock, LŽon. I am interested, however, in my daughter’s safety. A father must protect his only child, don’t you agree?”
“You talk in circles, Villar. What do you want?”
“I would be interested in knowing when the St. Justine leaves port with one of its ‘special’ cargos.”
“What is your interest in such matters? What does it matter to the local baker, so long as they buy their bread from you?”
“I do not want my daughter to marry a smuggler, monsieur.”
“That is a strong accusation,” Vercher carefully offered, pulling back slightly in his chair.
“Mon Dieu, LŽon, I do not care what cargo the St. Justine is carrying, to where or for whom. Nor do I care what they pay you to look away. I cannot sit back and let that bastard fisherman Bouchard steal my daughter. With enough information on him, I can make certain he leaves my Marianne alone. For good. So you see, a little information from time to time, shared over cafŽ or wine among friends. It is such a little thing.”
“Vraiment. This ‘little thing’ - how little?”
Villar smiled. The one thing he could count on was the greed of the harbor master. Marianne was wrong - the war had not changed everything after all.
R
26 Nov 1925
Mon ami, Andy
Marianne has agreed to marry. I am stunned beyond words.
Antoine
R
“Yes, child, I will bless your union through the church. Your father has told me he does not agree.”
The priest knew Marianne would have her own way, but he also knew she wanted to respect her father as well.
“I am not a child, Father. As a widow, of a marriage blessed in this very church, you cannot deny me my day before God based on such old traditions.”
“The Lord says to honor thy father,” he countered, knowing he was on a losing track.
“I will honor my father by asking him to bless our wedding in church. I will honor him by being a dutiful daughter. The Lord does not say I am bound like a maiden to his decree. I am an independent woman of the church, and I will be wed in the church!”
“Antoine is not baptized in the church,” the Father remarked, as a last ditch attempt to dissuade her on behalf of her father. He knew her response before he even completed the remark.
The meeting ended as the Father knew it would. He knew Marianne was right, and as a widow was within her rights as a member of the church and the community, despite her father’s anger. That night he included Antoine, Marianne, and Pierre Villar in his prayers. The following Sunday Antoine was baptized in the Pont-Aven Catholic church.
Antoine and Marianne were wed in church just after the new year. There were few in attendance because of the foul weather, but as the day had approached the well-wishers who came into the bakery gave their blessings to the union. Pierre Villar refused to attend, and ended the day passed out from too much brandy in his home. He would never forgive Marianne for abandoning him again.
Marianne made the humble cottage she and Antoine shared into a warm and loving home. She planted the garden come the following spring, while she still kept the garden she had worked these past years for her father. She still stoked the fires at the bakery every morning, despite the days her father never arrived. He spent too many days lost in a drunken haze, shut up in his cottage with a bottle of brandy.
When Antoine was out to sea for days at a time, Villar would rise and walk to the bakery in the morning. When the St. Justine was in port, he refused to talk to Marianne, and would not acknowledge Antoine even when passing him on the docks making his rounds.
Marianne reconciled her father’s anger, but refused to give in to his rantings. The villagers would talk about them in whispers, but Marianne refused to allow them to anger her.
“The old women love to gossip,” she would tell Antoine, sitting by the fire as the summer waned, and the autumn color returned to the land. “But they still need their bread, and who would shun the baker in such a small village?” she would add with a smile.
At night, when the darkness closed in, held back only by the soft glow of the hearth, Marianne’s warmth brought peace to him at long last.
AriŽle was born in May 1928. She had her mother’s green eyes, and brilliant red hair.
21 Oct 1928
Mon ami, Andy
I cannot describe the joy I feel when I hold AriŽle. I see her mother in her face, her eyes, and her stubbornness!
This life could not bring greater happiness. We have both been blessed.
Your friendship has given me the strength to dare to live such a life. Such a friend is a rare gift.
Antoine
Pierre Villar refused to accept the Alsatian’s child as his granddaughter.
R
“He is dangerous. He is interested in revenge against this fisherman for daring to marry his daughter, for driving her into what he believes is a sinful pairing and bearing a bastard girl-child. His emotions are his weakness, but he can be used.”
Vercher talked quietly with the two men as they sat in the cafŽ. His comrades were members of the PNB, the Parti National Breton - a nationalist Breton extremist organization. The PNB saw the German Nazis as a potential ally in their goal of a fascist Breton, free of foreigners and Jews. Smuggling had become one of the means by which the local organization, based in Lorient, funded its activities. That meant remaining on good terms with the local harbor masters. LŽon Vercher was only too pleased to do their bidding, as long as he remained in the circle.
“Can he be recruited?”
“I believe so. He is angry about the foreigners in port, especially this Alsatian Bouchard. He is connected with other small shop keepers in Pont-Aven. He thinks the democracy is out to ruin him with its taxes - like they all do.”
The men laughed, and poured another glass of wine.
“He also pays me to tell him when the boat St. Justine makes a run with contraband,” he chuckled. His two comrades were not as amused.
“Is he working for the police?”
“No, he is not that smart. He is looking for a way to strike at this Bouchard. A modern Madame Defarge!” They all laughed heartily at this reference to the character in Dickens Tale of Two Cities who so passionately seeks revenge she presaged her own destruction.
“Nonetheless,” the smaller of the two comrades mused, “he will have to be disposed of at the right time. This information could be used in the wrong places.”
R
Present Day
“OK, OK, let’s settle down. We are going to dispense with the usual curriculum today. Instead, I want to discuss the historical context of the ‘Juno Letters.’ Our friend Mr. Hewitt is away in France tracking down details related to the letters.”
Professor Douglas shunned modern electronics for a white board, colored markers, and an old overhead projector.
“We have discovered Antoine!” he announced with a flourish, writing the name “Antoine Bouchard” across the board. “As we suspected, Antoine Bouchard was a French resident of the Alsace-Lorraine at the start of the Great War who was conscripted into the German army. General practices during the time suggest strongly he was stationed at the Eastern Front.”
“How do we know that, Professor?”
“We don’t for certain. What we do know is the Germans did not trust the French conscripts. Both records and anecdotal evidence indicate these soldiers served in the fight against Imperial Russia. When Russia abandoned the war after the revolution, these troops were transferred en masse to the Western Front.
“Verifying this, however, is difficult. It is important to realize how incomplete the record is. It is true there are massive amounts of records of troop dispositions, supply records, individual soldier records, and so forth. Much of this information is digitized, but finding that one specific piece of information you need can be a challenge.
“Again, we need to take the broad view. Antoine Bouchard is confirmed to have been working as a POW for the American 447th Depot Detachment Engineers in Tours. This was H.W. Anderson’s outfit.”
“How was this confirmed?” It was the same student, a small bookish boy of nineteen who liked to interrupt.
“Let me show you.” He turned and strode to the white board and began to draw two parallel lines, top to bottom, several feet apart.
“The letters run on two tracks - one just after WWI, the other during WWII. If you plot the dates on a timeline,” and he stepped over to the projector and put up an acetate with a graph for display, “you see there are several letters early in the timeline, a cluster around the mid-1920s, then a gap. The letters begin again in 1941 and increase in frequency until the final letter on June 6, 1944.
“We do not know if there are any more letters stashed away somewhere. Given the circumstances behind the letters, I am somewhat amazed they survived at all. Neither do we know if this gap is significant or circumstantial.
“There are some things inferred by this. The first is that the two characters in this puzzle began to write in 1919. We know when Anderson was discharged - it is shown here in the timeline, before the first letter. That is a positive indication the two knew each other at Tours. That is where Mr. Hewitt started.
“What we learned in the process is this,” and he approached the white board again. “First, German POWs, especially these of French descent, were assigned to work details inside France. They performed menial work, such as kitchen duty in a headquarters unit.” He began to outline the talking points as he spoke.
“Second, such activities involved the transfer of funds. One of the fundamental methods of historical research is what is called forensic document analysis - or simply, ‘follow the money!’ Where there were fund transfers, there will be records.
“Third - funding records tend to persist. Finding them can be a challenge, as is wading through several million cryptic and rather dry entries. But that’s where you have to look.
“What Mr. Hewitt found was a POW assignment based on a serial number, P64335. That serial number was eventually traced to a file on one ‘Antoine Bouchard,’ and through that information to the payroll records of April 1919 for CO B, 447 DDE. Anderson was paid 19.60f on that record, and a transfer of 16.50f was paid for P64335.”
“But Professor, there could be hundreds of people in that unit.”
“You are right! Except, by 1919 the unit was demobilizing, and there were only a handful off soldiers left - only 12 were listed on the payroll record. In a unit as small as that the likelihood these two knew each other is high. The fact we have letters between them confirms this, at least within the scope of plausibility. Remember, we are not trying a criminal case here. Our ‘burden of proof’ is much less.”
“OK, Professor, we have found Antoine, and identified him. What do we know about him? Anything?”
“At this point, very little. We know he was a casual laborer at Chateau Kerbastic, which places him in Brittany, then a fisherman on the Breton peninsula. Hewitt is now trying to track this information down.
“We also know he met a woman, married, and had a child. A girl child. Civil records are of course excellent sources, but given the turbulence of the times immediately following, these cannot be a sure thing. Church records may also help, but these were kept at the local church, not in some massive data repository like you are all used to.”
“So Hewitt would have to know which church they were married in,” one of the students added, “which he would only know if he knew where they lived, which is what he is looking for!”
“Indeed. The proverbial ‘tangled web’ - and I don’t mean the Internet!” Douglas smiled.
That barb started a low chuckle rippling through the room.
“Now, the gap. There may simply be few letters written during the period. Perhaps things are somewhat quiet. Both persons married and had children - certainly a major distraction as many of you know. But here,” and he pointed to 1940 on the timeline, “here is where the story begins to intensify.”
“The ‘peaceful calm’ we hope existed here in the gap is now breached by the outbreak of the Second World War. Germany invades Poland, September 1939. France and Britain declare war, much to Hitler’s surprise. A period of relative quiet in the West follows, called the ‘phony war’ in most histories - although you would have a tough time selling that description to the Polish people.
“Then the invasion of the Low Countries. For the second time in the century, Germany invades Belgium, Denmark, and Holland - and then France. In a relatively few weeks, the blitzkrieg routes the French and British armies. British and many French troops evacuate through Dunkirk, Paris is occupied, and Germany extends its grip on the industrial resources of France, nearly doubling its industrial capacity in the process. It is now in command of Europe. The democracies have been knocked to their knees.
“Our task now is to follow the events that surround the letters, to build the scenery that forms the backdrop of this melodrama. Hewitt will remain in France, and is sharing his research regularly with me. We, in turn, will do much of the background work for him.”
He stepped forward and handed out stacks of papers to each row in the auditorium.
“Pass these back, if you will. There are research assignments based on your work groups. Please read these through and have an outline ready for next Monday,” he concluded as a slight groan arose in the class.
“Aw, come on! Did you really think we were going to study out of that textbook they made you buy? We are not going to read about history. We are going to write it!”
R