Carnival Read Free Page A

weeks as in 1940, the people of the Vosges kept much to themselves. Let’s not forget it, because we mustn’t, and just to prove it to you, I’m going to take you to have a look at the Lion.’
    They had had some soup and two of the regulation twenty-five gram slices of the grey National. They had each handed over a bread ticket and had left the customary two-franc donation for the Winter Relief that was run by the Secours National, the national help.
    They had tried to doze off, saying little, each knowing the other’s thoughts could well be in a turmoil. The future, which people seldom if ever thought about these days, was far too cloudy and troubling.
    Then they had come out here, the shadows deepening as they had approached the rock face, while etched in silhouette on high, the château, the citadel, defied assault as it had during the Franco-Prussian War.
    Hermann, his fedora pulled down hard, the collar of his greatcoat up and close, couldn’t seem to lower his gaze. He would be thinking of the 103-day siege that had ended twenty-­one days after the Armistice of that war, would be telling himself­ that Colonel Denfert-Rochereau of place D-R in Paris­, its métro station, too, and countless streets in France, had defied­ the Prussians for so long, even Bismark and the Kaiser had been forced to acknowledge the bravery and agree to freeing Belfort and its immediately surrounding territory from the fate so much of Alsace-Lorraine was to suffer. Annexation.
    He would also be seeing the dead of the Great War, the long, dark lines of the trenches in the snow, the gun emplacements, would be thinking of Vieil-Armand which was less than thirty-five kilometres to the northeast of them: Alsace’s Verdun where, for eight long, hard months over the winter of 1914–15 and into the summer, more than 30,000 men had died, but not himself, the French 75s answering his own 77s which had raced ahead to twenty-five rounds a minute. The drumfire, the Germans had come to call those French guns: Das Trommel­feuer ; while the French poilus , the common soldiers, had spoken of the other side’s shelling as la tempête de feu , the tempest of fire. He would know, too, that his partner was all too aware of this and that its enduring memories were but one of the things that had welded the partnership, but still, reminders must always be given.
    Some twenty-two metres long and eleven high, and caught against the sheer rock face below the citadel, resting on its hind quarters with right foreleg stiff and head turned a little from the rock out of which that head had been carved, the Lion, still in shadow cold, appeared as if about to roar.
    â€˜I always wondered what it would look like, Louis, but could never bring myself to see it.’
    Between 1875 and 1880, Colmar’s sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, had fashioned it largely out of blocks of that same rock as the citadel and the old town.
    â€˜The red sandstone of the Vosges,’ muttered Hermann sadly, ‘but there’s granite to the north and northeast,’ he said as if that were the answer to everything. ‘Granite’s far harder, Louis. It splinters when struck. Forms the busts, the heart, the guts of these rounded hills here in the south, is far worse than any shrapnel.’
    He touched his face, and one knew at once where those nicks and scars had come from. Belfort the ‘Heroic’ lay in the Trouée de Belfort, the Gap through which the invading hordes had come. Celts, Goths, Romans and others, the Germans of course, and more than once.
    â€˜We could see the Black Forest from the summit of Vieil-Armand,’ he went on. ‘We could see what we called home only to then have to give up the crest of that hill to your side. Time and again we took it; time and again it was lost.’
    Another cigarette was found and, once lit, passed over.
    â€˜Gerda was waiting for me,’ he said, as