It was a phrase Jean-Luc Leclerc had once read in an old book. It had caught his eye, and his subconscious had filed it away. At the moment he could not even remember who had written the book or what its title was, but neither was important. The book was forgettable; the phrase was not. Now, try as he might, he could not get it out of his head.
He felt as though every molecule in his body were shaking. Evil was on the march, and though everyone around him seemed bound and determined not to believe it, there was no question in his mind the Nazis were coming for them, for the people of France, all of them, with all their murderous fury, and he desperately feared the bloodbath that was coming with the jackboots and the broken cross.
Not that anyone was listening to him. And who was he, anyway, to think he knew what fate lay in store for his country? He was just a kid, really, only twenty-eight years old, and when he looked in the mirror every morning, he didn’t see anyone special. He didn’t stand out in a crowd. He was of average height and average build, with sandy-blond hair and bluish-green eyes set behind round, gold wire-rimmed glasses that made him look a bit more studious, even intellectual, than he really was. He’d always wanted to grow a beard—a goatee, at least—but even his adorable young wife teased him that his efforts were never quite successful.
He had no great office or title or power, no money or fame or renown. He had no direct access to the political class or the media. He was, instead, a nearly penniless son of five generations of farmers. A Protestant in a nation where Catholics were by far the majority, he was a lowly pastor—actually merely an assistant pastor—in a little country church in the little country hamlet of Le Chambon, in the south of France, which no one had heard of nor probably ever would. Why should anyone take him seriously?
There was no reason, he told himself, but that didn’t mean he was wrong.
To the north, Winston Churchill was warning that Hitler wanted to take over the world. The new British prime minister had been saying it for years. No one had listened. Now der Führer was on the march, and France was not ready. Not the people. Not the politicians. Not the press. Not even the generals.
In Paris, they said the Germans would never dare to invade France. They said the Nazis could never penetrate the Maginot Line, the twenty-five-kilometer-thick virtual wall of heavily armed and manned guard posts and bunkers and concrete tank barricades and antiaircraft batteries and minefields and all manner of other military fortifications designed to keep the Germans at bay. They’d convinced themselves Hitler would never try to move his panzer divisions through the forests of the Ardennes. Those forests were too thick, too dense, too foreboding for anyone to move tanks and mobile artillery and armored personnel carriers and other mechanized units through.
But Jean-Luc Leclerc knew that they were wrong.
“Luc? Luc, are you listening?”
No one actually called him Jean-Luc. Not since he was a little boy. His parents, his siblings, his grandparents—they all called him Luc.
Now, though he still felt like a kid at times, theoretically he was “all grown up.” Married. Two small daughters. A mortgage. A parish. Ever-growing responsibilities.
“Luc, are you even hearing a word I’m saying?”