Theo was laughing by now. ‘No, we didn’t.’

‘Trying to make fighters out of those French boys was no holiday. They were keen, I’ll give them that. And a lot of the country boys could shoot already; they made very nice snipers. But discipline? Drill? Impossible. But it wasn’t just that. There was hostility, jealousy, rivalry, all the local quarrels you can think of. If the man that you had a dispute with about the price of hay or a sliver of land supported Group Noix, then you would help Group Rainbow. Henri spent days on end, riding round, getting the farmers to agree to help us. And then these buggers in Noix would turn up and take without asking. So then, naturally, the peasants wouldn’t give anything to us. Noix stole one of our arms caches. When that happened, in forty-three, we almost had a local war here. It was just after Dr Maniotte was arrested and then Henri. That’s when the FTP began to say that it was Henri’s fault; that he was no good. Things were very bad. You know what I think was the real trouble? It was Henri being socialist. Communists hate socialists worse than fascists, you know that?

‘At the beginning of forty-four we began to get organised, at last, and they set up the National Council of the Resistance, with regional committees and local committees and liaison officers to try to make the communist and the free Resistance work together. By then the FTP were more royalist than the king. You wouldn’t think they’d spent two years sitting on their arses, doing nothing from thirty-nine to forty-one.’

Nikola got up to throw more logs onto the fire. ‘You know all this,’ he said, half-question, half-statement. ‘Madame Ariane was our area liaison officer with the FTP. She and Henri took over here when Dr Maniotte was arrested and they split the work between them. She went to the regional committee as the representative of the Secret Army.’

Theo, gazing at the new flames flaring round the logs, did not reveal that he had not known. ‘You tell it anyway,’ he said. ‘Tell it as you saw it.’

‘Two months, three maybe, she worked with them on our plans for D-Day. German Army Group G covered this area of France. We knew that whenever D-Day came, wherever the landings were, in the Mediterranean, Normandy, Pas-de-Calais, wherever, some of those troops, particularly the armoured divisions, would be ordered immediately to the front. We had to delay them. We made plans to blow up the river bridges, to cut the rail lines, east-west and north-south. And not just once, you understand. The Germans could repair a blown track in forty-eight hours, maximum. So over and over again we had to be able to do it, until we ran out of plastic. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the Germans hardly dared step out of the towns around here.’

He stretched out his long legs and arms until his chair creaked. ‘D-Day. I tell you, the night before, 5 June, I’ll never forget the excitement. Someone came for me at about eleven at night to say, it’s for tomorrow. We thought it meant a general uprising. We were all going to meet the following morning at our appointed rendezvous and then each group to its task. That was the theory.’