Gendarmes were part of the military. Why didn’t they go to the front themselves instead of chasing conscripts? They should be fighting rather than court-martialling men who could ill afford to leave their land. The arrival of the blue-uniformed gendarmes always signalled trouble. They brought the orders from Paris like the one on 2 August instructing the husbands, sons and fathers to leave. No one slept that night, knowing that the next day the men must depart for war, and there was no knowing when or if they would ever return. It was inhuman. And so they were not about to give the gendarmes the gift of revealing the Boche in their midst.

They did, however, send Le Piqueur up to tell him to clear off. Old Lucien was a well-built man of seventy-five and they called him Le Piqueur because, in his younger days, he had been an expert hunter, flushing out prey with his dogs. And it was as a hunter that he went up one morning to tell the German to make himself scarce. Mont d’Orcières was no place for lions and tigers, nor for metal cages and bare rocks that attracted lightning. Since they had been there, the looming hill, which had always made the villagers fearful, was now driving them mad. In spite of his age and his gammy leg, Le Piqueur climbed the track with his dog, Atlas. Part Pyrenean Shepherd, part Beauceron, Atlas was large and imposing and capable of keeping a bull at bay. Le Piqueur didn’t take his hound with him to intimidate the lion tamer, but to give himself courage. You are never on your own with a dog; they will always back you up. Especially this one, a beast capable of holding off two wild boar for an entire morning. A forty-kilo dog who was fast and stood tall, who could jump like a horse. Atlas was often to be seen bounding along narrow paths chasing deer through boxwood and crossing rivers as nimbly as land. He could drive a 120-kilo boar into a corner and keep it there, even if it meant rubbing against its tusks, which could easily gore him. Le Piqueur was linked to his dog by an invisible bond. All the way up the mountain, the dog patrolled in front of him, full of pride to be leading his master, but with no idea of what he was about to hunt. When old Lucien started up the last part of the ascent, which was so steep his shoes slipped on the dry ground, he felt his dog hanging back. By the final few metres Atlas was glued to his side.