Free Leontyne by Richard Goodwin

be in the deep country away from the roar of industrial Charleroi and the swank of the casino in Namur. The Ardennes on an evening such as this is as beautiful as anywhere that I have travelled. I wonder if the crew of the American tank that has been left beside the road at Agimont appreciated the beauty of the place.
    Agimont is a very small hamlet on the border between Belgium and France. There is an agreeable chandler there who caters for the barge people as well as pleasure craft. We refuelled and bought a few items from his shop which was one of those places that has everything stacked away with no apparent order. We started to talk about the tank and the war over an excellent glass of Prunes de Bourgogne (this was the only place I have been able to find it). I wanted to know what it had been like to be a civilian in the war and to have occupying forces in a village of this size. He told me that I should talk to the local schoolmaster who had been at the school in Agimont for forty-four years and remembered both world wars.
    The next morning the chandler came to the boat and we walked to the schoolmaster’s house. The house was at one end of a neat little terrace of brick houses and had a courtyard at the back. At the side of the court there was the entrance to a living room that was jammed with furniture and an enormous stove which was burning merrily away. The schoolmaster was bright-eyed and very clear-thinking and immediately started to talk about his recollections of seventy-four years before. The old boy had so much authority that the chandler (an ex-pupil) and I sat on the floor spellbound.
    He told of how the French army had arrived dressed in thered and blue uniforms of the Napoleonic pattern with their fixed bayonets glinting in the sun. He told us of how he had helped the soldiers, who had had no field kitchen, to fill their waterbottles and start cooking on fires beside the road. How quickly it all changed, he said. The French were pushed back and the German army of occupation took over.
    He described how terrible it had been for civilians in the first war in those parts. There had been many brutalities and reprisals on a much worse scale than in the second war. This was the reason that, as soon as it became clear that the Germans would again overrun the Ardennes in the Second World War, the population immediately left for France. The old man told us how in mid-May, forty-eight years before, the French army had again come along the road through his village and, convinced that there would be no war, had pushed sprigs of lilac down the muzzles of their field artillery. He had gone with the refugees and had returned after a couple of months, to start up the school again, but was infuriated to find that his house had been looted and his prized camera had been taken as well as his mattress – two things which were almost impossible, in those days, to replace.
    He spoke with great passion about the inadequacies of the military mind, how little the generals had profited by history, and about the inaccuracies of the bombing and shelling by both sides. The Germans had a large ammunition dump in the forest near Agimont and this had been communicated to the Allies, who bombed the area a number of times but never anywhere near the dump: some of the bombs fell near his school and smashed the windows.
    I left the old man’s house thinking that I would never be able to understand what it was like to be living in a country that was under occupation. Would one be heroic or passively resistant or, perhaps, collaborate? How did he explain the situation to his pupils then, and how did he place it in historical terms now? In eighty-eight years he had hardlystrayed from this place of, at the most, two thousand inhabitants, and yet he had probably had more real things happen to him in his life than most people would dream possible.

Chapter Four
Agimont to Rheims
    We left Agimont in a swirling mist and crossed the border