As a young man, Lainé had read La vie de Patrice Pearse by Louis le Roux. He had been left with a sense of awe, and of duty to those who had been martyred for Ireland in 1916. Like many autonomists, he had felt in his heart that those Irish lives had been sacrificed not just for Ireland, but also for men like him. The struggle to throw the French yoke off Breton shoulders needed the same spirit as had been shown by the Irish if it were to succeed, that shared Celtic fire in the warriors’ bellies.
The coming of the Reich had seemed like a kiss from God. A gift, a means to achieve what Bretons lacked the might to do for themselves. So as France fell, Lainé organised and recruited, armed his men with weapons supplied by the Germans, and fought.
Soon, Lainé discovered a talent he had never suspected he possessed. He had trained and worked as a chemical engineer, a useful vocation when manufacturing explosive devices, but a newly unearthed ability shocked everyone, including himself: he found he had an innate expertise in dragging information from prisoners.
On a hot night early in the occupation, Lainé and three comrades captured a Resistance fighter in fields north of Nantes. Two others had gotten away. Lainé began by asking for the names of the escaped men. The prisoner refused, giving only his own name, Sylvain Depaul. He was not from the area. Lainé would have known him otherwise.
They blindfolded Depaul and brought him to a barn on a sloping hillside. Cattle slept all around, oblivious to the men who crossed their fields. Lainé bound the résistant to a pillar. His wrists were slippery with sweat as they were fixed in place, tied tight to the wood. Depaul’s own belt was wrapped around his neck and buckled at the rear of the pillar, leaving him pinned and choking.
“Who were the others?” Lainé asked again.
“I’ve already told you,” Depaul said, the words coughed out from his restricted throat. “I was alone. I was just out walking.”
“With a Browning pistol?” Lainé stroked Depaul’s cheek with the weapon’s muzzle.
“For rabbits. I was going to make a fire and cook one.”
Lainé stabbed at Depaul’s lips with the muzzle, mashing the flesh against his teeth. Depaul turned his head away as far as the belt would allow, blood spilling from his torn skin.
“I have no patience for this,” Lainé said. “This is not a game. If you cooperate, you might live. I can’t guarantee that, but it remains a possibility. On the other hand, if you lie, if you hold back information, then it is a certainty that you will suffer and die.”
In Lainé’s mind, they were only words. He had been interrogated by police officers years ago, after the bombing of the Monument to the Unity of Brittany and France in Rennes. They screamed question after question at him, slapped his face, pulled his hair. Harsh, but hardly torture. He had never experienced such a thing. Thus, he was as surprised as anyone when he set the pistol aside, took an ivory-handled penknife from his pocket, heated the blade in the flame of the oil lamp until its tip glowed, then pressed it against Depaul’s cheek.
As the résistant howled, and the other men coughed at the smell of scorched meat, Lainé felt a surge of something he did not recognise in his chest. Power? Pride? As Depaul cried, Lainé smiled.
“I’ll ask you again,” he said. “Who were the others who fled when we captured you?”
Depaul growled, spat blood on his own shirt, swallowed his pain. “There was no one. I was alone.”
Lainé had not expected to be pleased at Depaul’s refusal to speak. Nevertheless, there it was: the pleasure of anticipating the next cruel act. He returned the blade to the oil lamp’s flame, watched as traces of Depaul’s blood and skin bubbled and burned away.
“I was on my own,” Depaul said, his voice liquid, no longer hard and defiant. “I swear. God help me, I’d tell you if there was anyone else, but there wasn’t, I promise.”
Lainé reached behind the pillar, seized the thumb of DePaul’s right hand.
“Once more, who were your companions?”
“Please, I was alone. There was—”
Lainé pushed the tip of the blade beneath Depaul’s thumbnail. Depaul screamed. The three Bretons stepped back. One of them ran outside, covering his mouth, vomit dribbling between his fingers.
Keeping the blade in place, Lainé asked, “Who were your companions?”
Depaul shook his head from side to side, his voice stretching thin as his lungs emptied.
Lainé explored the tenderness beneath the nail. The blade’s tip burrowed in, worked the keratin loose from the flesh until it peeled away.
Depaul talked.
He told them the names of his two companions, local men, and the location to which they had been heading. The British were to drop a crate by parachute into a field not even a mile away. When Lainé and his men reached it, they found it contained rifles, ammunition and radio equipment. Within twenty four hours, Depaul’s friends had been rounded up and executed alongside him.
As Lainé developed his newfound talent, his reputation travelled. Soon it only took the mention of the Breton’s name to convince a résistant to talk. It would have been a lie to deny the pleasure of such notoriety. Power in its purest form. The power of fear. Lainé grew accustomed to it quickly and never suspected he would lose that power.
Now in Ireland, in his mid-fifties, he had nothing. He had lacked the foresight to rob and rape as the Reich crumbled, leaving him to run with empty pockets. Had it not been for the contacts he had made with the IRA, heroes in his mind, he might never have escaped the wrath of the Allies and found his way to Ireland.
Lainé still remembered the crushing disappointment of finally meeting the Irish revolutionaries he had so idolised. In his imagination, they were the noble defenders of the working Celtic man. They were Patrick Pearse, they were James Connolly, they were Michael Collins.
In truth, they were a disjointed network of farmers, socialists and fascists, bigots and blowhards, an army whose war had come and gone decades before. They had sided with the Nazis during the war, even formulating plans to assist the Germans in an invasion of Northern Ireland to oust the British presence there, but they proved themselves incapable of such ambitious schemes.
Fleeing in defeat had been like swallowing thorns for Célestin Lainé. But now, years later, he knew it was better than the hopeless purgatory the fanatics of the IRA wallowed in. They had not quite won their struggle for independence; the northern part of their island remained under the thumb of the British and their Protestant caretakers, while the rest of the nation was ruled by a self-serving government that had turned on the brave warriors whose sacrifice had made its very existence possible.
And now the best the IRA had to offer was ill educated louts like Paddy Murtagh and his belligerent father Caoimhín, full of songs about the virtuous struggle of revolution and precious little else.
As Lainé feared, young Murtagh placed his glass back on the table, inhaled a breath that rattled wet and thick at the back of his throat, and sang.
“Come all you warriors and renowned nobles, who once commanded brave warlike bands,” he slurred.
Elouan Groix gave Lainé a weary look. Lainé shrugged, raised a hand to say, what can I do?
Murtagh drew breath and let more of the dirge spill from his mouth. “Throw down your plumes and your golden trophies, give up your arms with a trembling hand.”
As Murtagh inhaled at the end of the couplet, Lainé heard the dog outside in the yard. It jerked on its chain and let loose a torrent of yelps and barks.