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GENERAL |
| that any crime whatsoever,
committed in the absence of the gendarmes, would be punished by death under
martial law. A flier circulated to that effect warned the population
of these dire consequences.
The nature of the crime committed by Monsieur Denis on a Saturday morning never was established with certainty. The only claim made by the only witness, a seven-year-old child, the daughter of the Mayor of Lasalle, was that Monsieur Denis, an elderly, one-armed veteran of World War I, had "molested" her in some way in a vineyard where she was playing. She came home with the complaint and the father alerted the Maquis. The Maquis decided to intervene in accordance with its own proclamation, and arrested Monsieur Denis. A black Citroën Traction Avant stopped in the town square that evening, in front of the Denis home. The old man was invited into the car. There was a hastily-assembled court of martial law at the Maquis' headquarters, and Denis was condemned to death. But in order to make of this "criminal" a horrible example, he was severely beaten and taken into town on Sunday morning. Coming out of church at eleven-thirty, I saw several black Tractions Avant arrive at the Plaza in front of the church. The Maquisards extracted from one of them the half-dead Denis and bound him to a large sycamore. They invited the gathering crowd to finish him off with their own hands. A few stones were thrown by some children, but the crowd remained passive. Madame Denis had witnessed the events and had raced down to the Catholic church on the other side of the square, to implore her priest to do something for her husband. There was little anyone could do. The Maquisards had disappeared in a cloud of dust and had warned that anyone attempting to free Denis would be shot together with him. Yet the passivity of the crowd made me realize that I was not alone in the revulsion against the action of our guardians. There was, perhaps, a means of exerting pressure on the Maquis to have them remove their victim from the town's square. This means occurred to me in a flash. There was a funeral scheduled for three o'clock in the afternoon. The procession was to go directly from the home of the deceased, without passing by the church, to the cemetery. There was indeed a way to avoid the plaza by joining the road leading up to the burial ground through a street behind the church. But I assumed that this detail would escape the Maquis, not too familiar with the topography of the town. Since communication with the Maquis was mostly through couriers and by word of mouth, I declared an ultimatum and spread it as widely as possible among those I knew to be sympathetic to the Maquis. I declared firmly that I would not proceed with the funeral as long as Denis was bound to the tree in front of the church. Nothing more and nothing less. The Maquis had to choose between the public punishment of Denis or the public conscience. After a brief luncheon
at the hotel I went home to prepare for the ceremony. Then I went
to the church to don my robes and go to the home of the deceased.
Five minutes before the scheduled departure of the funeral procession,
we heard the roar of the Tractions Avant in the plaza. Six men with
Bren guns emerged and |
