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| Notre Dame Paris, 2013 |
I've been thinking a good deal about Notre Dame burning in Paris. I know I am not alone. My first of many visits to the most visited monument in Paris (yes, more than the Eiffel Tower) was in 1982; our Armistice Centenary Tour visited Notre Dame ten months ago. I will never forget or ever be able to fully express in words what walking into an 850-year-old Gothic cathedral feels like. It still feels that way.
To the thousands who participated in building it, what did all the splendor mean? To a world secularizing at warp speed, what does a centuries-old stone church mean? I explore some of these questions in chapter 27 of my WWII historical fiction book The Resistance (available at bondbooks.net). My protagonist downed B-17 pilot and his French Resistance escort are forced to hide from the encircling SS manhunt on the precipitous tiles of a Medieval house directly across the street from another French Gothic structure, Bayeux Cathedral. Here's what happened:
27
HEIGHT OF TERROR
T
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he alarm now wailed in Evans’ head, unrelenting,
inescapable. Then, abruptly, it was no longer internal.
From the street came the
roar of engines, tires thrumming on the cobblestones, brakes screeching to a
halt, doors slamming, jackboots clonking on the pavement. Crisp
knocking on a door. Silence. Fists beating a door. Shouting in German. Rifle butts pounding on a door five stories below.
“Maybe it is another door,” hissed Andre,
his face ashen. “Perhaps for someone else?”
Hasty footfalls came from the stairs, then
rapid knocking on the door of Andre’s studio.
Through the keyhole came a breathless voice.
“They are coming! Waffen SS!”
“For us? Are you certain?”
“Absolutely. At the door of the shop.”
“How much time?”
“Three minutes. No more,” and he was gone.
Aimée grabbed Evans’ arm. “We must hide
you!” He drew in breath sharply. His shoulder was not fully healed yet.
“Forget me,” said Evans. “Hide Ruben.”
“It is you they are searching for,” said Aimée,
her green eyes wide and imploring. “You are an American flyer. If they find
you, they will arrest all of us, including Ruben.”
She turned to Andre. “Is there anywhere?”
“The roof.” With a sweep of his arm, he
cleared the workbench. “Out the window. Climb along the gable. Do not fall. Hide
behind the chimney. Be sure they do not see you.”
“I want to go home.” There was a quaver in Ruben’s
voice; he tugged at Aimée’s hand.
“Evans, you must hurry,” said Aimée, leaning
toward him as if to give him farewell kisses on the cheeks.
“No!” said Andre. “You must hide as well. I will take the boy down. He is my cousin. It
will look normal with the boy. They are not searching for a little boy.”
Aimée began to protest.
“There is no time. Go now! Hide with the
American. We will stall them.”
Swallowing the lump in his throat, Evans
followed Aimée out the window and onto the steep, slate roof. He tried not to
look down. The hard cobblestones, he knew they were far below.
Scrambling behind the chimney, Evans drew in
a deep breath and let it out slowly. He’d flown bombing missions high over
enemy-occupied Europe, antiaircraft riddling his Fort, Fw190 fighters swooping
in for the kill. Why more raw fear at this?
He heard the SS captain barking orders at
his men in German, the harsh commands echoing across the street below and
bouncing back at them off the west façade of the cathedral. Dropping bombs from
20,000 feet on munitions factory buildings, dangerous as it was, was detached,
impersonal, done with machines. This was close, human, intimate, and—he feared—soon
to be face-to-face.
Aimée and Evans pressed against the
brickwork of the chimney. It wasn’t much cover, but it was all they had. A
soldier glancing up from the street at just the right angle, and they would be
seen. They pressed closer together, hard against the ridge and the chimney. Evans
heard and felt Aimée’s heart pounding next to him, and the clutching staccato
of her breath. Or was it his own?
“All we can do is wait,” whispered Evans,
his voice barely audible.
Aimée’s face was pale. “And pray.” She
mouthed the words. “I could not bear it if anything happened to my little
brother.”
He nodded, trying to slow down the hammering
of his heart. Directly across the narrow street loomed the massive cathedral. Evans
studied the intricate medieval statuary adorning the west façade. The resurrection
of the dead, souls rising from tombs, some to heaven, more to hell. Clearly the
stonemason was more interested in the howling torments of the damned in hell.
A spasm fluttered in Evans’ left hamstring
muscle. He tried to ignore it. The spasm hardened, constricting and
contracting, tightening into an iron fist. If only he could change positions. The
pain was excruciating. He tried to relax, but it was impossible, not while
clinging to a precipitous roof on a medieval house far above the street. Teeth
clenched, a tremor ran through his body.
“What is the matter, Evans?” whispered Aimée.
He swallowed hard and attempted to control
the quavering he knew would be in his voice if he spoke.
“Are you ill?”
“Cramp,”
he managed to mouth, “in my leg.”
“I am sorry for you,” she whispered. “Perhaps,
pressure directly on the muscle?”
He nodded. Holding on for dear life, how was
he going to apply direct pressure to the back of his thigh?
“Think of something else,” she suggested.
She bobbed her head at the cathedral façade. “Think of that.”
He looked again at the medieval stonework; the
muscle in his leg felt like hard stone. The writhing condemned in the Last
Judgment scene looked like he felt at the moment. Evans studied the north
portal. It began to make sense. The mason had chiseled stony vignettes from the
Passion of Christ. There was the Last Supper, the betrayal, Jesus praying to
his father in the garden; and there was the kiss of Judas, the arrest, torture,
carrying the cross, brutal crucifixion.
Evans shuddered. The war, the SS bursting
into homes, arrests, torture, senseless killing, reprisals, ambush, spies, double
agents, secret radio transmissions—being shot down, bailing out, hunted, others
in grave danger because of him. How would all that look in stone relief?
He scanned back through the stone vignettes,
the knot in his hamstring subsiding. Why had they done it, carved those scenes
in stone, built the entire structure, all in stone?
It suddenly occurred to Evans that from this
angle, cowering high atop the roof of a medieval house, he and Aimée were
seeing parts of the cathedral others never saw. Statues so high up, so out of
sight from passersby, they were impossible to be seen from the pavement. Slowly,
he scanned the facade, higher and higher it continued. People had lived in the
shadow of Bayeux’s cathedral for nearly 1000 years, and how many hundreds of
intricately carved statuary had never been seen by anyone? Yet humble stonecutters
had tap-tapped away for years, decades, generations, each successive mason
doing his part to create this magnificent place, whether his work would ever be
seen by anyone or not. What was so important that centuries of workers would do
it?
As Evans mused, the sun began to set and a
golden glow radiated from the façade of the ancient edifice. Even if it had
been safe to speak aloud, what was on display at that instant was so
spectacular, wonder alone would have hushed them.
What had the voice on the BBC broadcast said
only a short while ago? “When Christ died, he died
for you individually just as much as if you’d been the only man in the world.” Evans
wasn’t at all sure what it meant; Sunday School had been long ago; he needed to
think more deeply about it. But whatever it did mean, it made him feel that
there had to be something bigger, far more important than his own troubles.
Jolted abruptly back to the peril of the
moment, Evans and Aimée heard the harsh barking of the SS captain apparently
reentering the street below. They could not see anything, but his words echoed from
the gulf between the house and the façade of the cathedral.
“Please, God, not Ruben,” whispered Aimée.
Evans nodded in agreement. He wanted to see
what was going on five stories below, in the street. He felt so helpless. What
good was a flyer without his weapon, his plane? If only he could do something
to stop the Germans.
“When will they leave?”
Evans shook his head. He had no idea. How
long would they have to hide? All night?
The yelling continued, guttural, harsh, brutal.
There was nothing to do but wait. Oddly, as they waited, involuntarily crammed
together behind the chimney, high atop the medieval house, they began to feel
detached from the commotion, as if their vantage point made them safe, at least
for the instant.
“If I tell you something,” whispered Evans, “can
you promise not to tell anyone else?”
Aimée looked wary. “Oui, bien sur.”
Evans cleared his throat, loosening the
scarf at his neck. “I-I am not a big fan of heights.”
Aimée looked wide-eyed at him, and then her
lips twitched slightly, as if she were restraining herself; it was hardly the
time for humor.
“You are a pilot. You fly the mighty B-17,
the Flying Fortress. The high-altitude bomber of your Army Air Corps. Are you
telling me that you are afraid of heights?”
Evans nodded. “Always have been. Never liked
climbing trees. Never slept in the top bunk. I told my younger brother it was
the best mattress. Until one day he figured it out. I had to pay him off with
marbles to keep quiet. And then we got older, but he still remembered.”
“It is courageous to do this.”
“What, to tell you?”
“I suppose. But I think it is courageous to
fly high-altitude bomber airplanes when you are afraid of heights, in defiance
of your fears.”
“Courageous? Maybe, or maybe just dull-witted.”
Aimée smiled. “You being dull-witted this
morning at the checkpoint, it was merely a ruse
de guerre.”
Evans nodded. “I get a hitch in my innards
just hearing the words high-altitude. I really should have volunteered to do
something closer to the ground.”
“Then you would not be here.” Aimée said it
as a matter of fact.
Evans stole a glance at her.
“Ruse
de guerre,” she said. “Comprenez-vous?”
Evans swallowed, avoiding her gaze, her
green eyes that looked right through you. Ruse
de guerre, he understood. Deception of war. Everyone in wartime engaged in
it—generals, prime ministers, spies, deep-cover agents. And so was he.
It was nearly dark. The yelling abruptly
stopped. For an instant there was silence in the invisible gulf below
them. Suddenly, vehicle engines roared
to life, and the SS sped north down the Rue de Bienvenu.
Read all of The Resistance by Douglas Bond
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