March 20, 2015
Deep in the dark wood, something stirred: Aze to near Chartres
FASCINATING, the things you discover if you give yourself time to look. I was on one of those rural roads you forget even as you're riding them and I felt grateful for the distraction of a memorial to the right. I stopped. I'm glad I did because the explanatory panel rightly described what had happened there as "unreal".
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For years during the war, well behind German lines, villagers had housed hundreds of downed airmen here in the Fréteval wood. They came from Britain, the USA, Belgium, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, all passed along escape lines until they reached here — where the Resistance established their Marathon camp.
Doctors came, and butchers and bakers, and now and then a convoyeur with another airman to be smuggled, in time, down to neutral Spain and from there to Britain. At times, dozens of men could be living in these woods while German patrols passed on the same road that I had just ridden. Only one person, a convoyeuse known only as Virginia, was ever caught. She was sent to a death camp in Germany without ever revealing her secret.
The bravery of the Resistance can never be overestimated.
And the story has a link because what I should have mentioned is that, yesterday, I was distracted by a sign in Montoire to a "historic railway station". You see signs like that all the time in America and I always smile and look patronising because railways date only from the 19th century and may be old but hardly historic. In France, though, all Europe in fact, such a sign merits investigation. Especially if it doesn't entail riding very far.
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There was nobody there when I arrived. I wasn't even sure there were trains any more and there was nothing to be seen through the darkened windows. It took a while to realise that it was here that Philippe Pétain, the French leader, shook hands with Hitler, a gesture that would have sent him to the guillotine had de Gaulle not commuted his old master's sentence.
Shaking hands is a Pavolvian twitch in France — you do it without realising — and on the face of it not too much should be read into a gent with old-fashioned manners shaking hands with anyone, even France's conqueror. But it's the symbolism that counted, of course, and the old man was never forgiven.
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Well, it was grey again today and greyer by the hour, literally, because there was an eclipse. It made itself felt even through a solid slate sky. It's funny, the way it turned out, because the papers have been full of warnings about the dangers of looking at the sky. And when that wore thin, someone discovered that it would all happen when children were in class and that they weren't going to be allowed out into the recré to see it. Some saw this as a good thing, others as a dreadful plot by politicians in Paris. A feature of the school system here in France is that every school in the land follows the same timetable. The minister of education in Paris can look at his watch and know that 12-year-olds are studying geography whether they're in Tours, Toulouse or Toulon. That also means they'd all be indoors during what one letter-writer over-excitedly called "the event of a lifetime" and led another to ask "For heaven's sake, don't they have astronomical timetables up there in Paris?"
They needn't have bothered. The greatest sensation of this "event of a lifetime", which in fact happens every decade or so, was the one you get when you're sure it's going to rain but it doesn't.
There'll be something about it in the papers tomorrow, I expect, but they'll be stuck for pictures. Today, page after page has been filled by yesterday's election. The far-right Front National didn't do anywhere near as well as its supporters hoped and everyone else feared and the centre-right and centre-left both claimed victory because the first did better than expected and the second didn't do as badly. Such is politics.
I read all that in pretty Dangeau and then still more in a chambre d'hôtes in Le Temple, just short of Chartres. It was the end of a day of wide, lonely fields—the Beauce, the most productive cereals region of France—where the only diversion has been to see men in grubby sweaters and wellington boots, with dripping noses from the cold wind, struggling with lengths of white, flexible pipes.
Hallelulia! I shall be back into even modest hills tomorrow and out of this billiard-table flatness.
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