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| Just before lunch on June 16th I had called the Soulier family about
a visit with them in the afternoon; I was to bring my Greek New Testament
and to translate some of I Corinthians with Jean. After lunch, therefore,
I took my New Testament under my arm and strolled out to the Soulier house
beyond the edge of town. On the empty stretch of road between the
town and the Souliers', I passed the young gendarme posted at the entrance
to Cornelly, exchanging a greeting. These were probably the last
words he ever heard. I then turned into the driveway of the Souliers,
greeting the farmer who rented from them, with his wife and four daughters,
the ground floor and the stables of the large square building. I
climbed the straight, steep granite stairs to the Soulier apartment.
Jean was indeed home but so were, as well, some unexpected visitors.
There was Pierre Bourelly, the son of missionaries in Africa, who had been
in class with Jean. He was stopping by for only a few hours, and
had brought messages from the Résistance in Nîmes to a group
in Lasalle. There were also two cousins of Jean's, Jeanne and Alice.
They lived with their widowed father, a rich vintner from the plains, and
had nothing to do during their vacation. They had taken their bicycles,
without telling their father, and pedaled to Lasalle to visit their cousin.
They were supposed to leave town early in the afternoon in order to be
home before their father would return from a trip to Nîmes.
While everybody was busy talking around the large round table in the kitchen, I coaxed Jean into the living room near the window, where we plowed into our Greek text. We had already worked through several verses, when Jean noticed two or three German trucks, preceded by a small van, coming down the road from the mountain pass to the south, the direction of Saint Hippolyte. Alès, where the Waffen SS was stationed, was to the north. What were the Germans doing here? Were they on their way through or did they have something else in mind? We alerted the rest of the family immediately. There could be danger, as Cornelly was so close to the house. Peering through the wooden shutters in the bedroom, we came in time to see the rapidly moving events. Since the van was of French make, the guard neither moved nor gave the alert. As the Germans alighted right in front of the gendarme, the Lieutenant put his Luger to the man and pulled the trigger. The second truck was racing up the driveway toward Cornelly, but was stopped when a land mine under a culvert blew up prematurely. The soldiers in the truck jumped out and began storming the castle, but were quickly pinned behind the trees, as the two machine guns of the Maquis began to bellow. We had seen enough. A stray bullet could easily pierce the shutters.
With a battle shaping up we had to think of our own safety. Leaving
through the front door was out of the question. But there was a side
door through the stables on the lower level of the house. All of
us, the farmer, his wife and four daughters, and the Souliers and their
guests, assembled in the stable to see if we could leave the house without
attracting the attention of the Germans, who could easily mistake us for
another detachment of the Maquis and shoot us on sight. The stable
door opened in fact onto a large treeless meadow, which would deny us any
cover for a long and |
