In the course of these wanderings Jacques Dorme saw the ordinary prisoners' huts on the far side of the road and, one day, for the first time in his life, an execution by hanging. One of the hanged men was very talclass="underline" his toes stuck into the earth like the point of a top, his body spun round upon itself several times, before growing slack… Jacques Dorme experienced a vague feeling of shame, resenting this status of military aristocracy the pilots enjoyed.
It was in that camp across the road, during the summer of 1941, that he noticed a long column of Russian soldiers and thus learned that the other war, the one everyone had been waiting for, had just broken out.
One night the earth smell that dogged him was unbearable. He got up, crossed the room in the darkness, 'went to open the door, and suddenly noticed a glimmer of light behind the pile of old crates, then the silhouette of one of the Poles. That was where the smell came from. Seeing themselves caught in the act, the men made no further attempt at concealment. At the corner of the house a hole opened out into the ground. A head appeared there, eyes blinking in the aura of a match. The Poles looked at one another. Without exchanging any words, as if it was quite simply his turn, Jacques Dorme began helping them to shift the earth from the tunnel.
They escaped on a night of torrential rain at the beginning of autumn. The guards did not dare to set foot outside, the searchlights looked like the glaucous lights of some bathyscaphe, smells and footprints were swallowed up in the mud. One of the pilots, Witold, knew the area well. The next day they reached a village, where they spent two days hidden in a peasant's cellar. It was he who warned them that a search was being organized to retrieve the fugitives. They had time to get away, but on entering the forest had an argument: Witold wanted to press on toward the east, the other two proposed to mark time, wait, and prepare for winter. Jacques Dorme went with Witold, and that is how after several nights' march, they crossed the Russian frontier, without at first being aware of it, and found themselves in the unstable and deceptive world of the land just behind the front line.
They came upon villages where the orchards were heavy with fruit but the streets were peopled with corpses, like that hamlet in the Kiev region where a dozen women who had been shot looked as if they were resting after a day of harvesting. They skirted the towns – during the night – and would sometimes hear German songs, drunken voices. One day they found themselves in a stretch of surrounded territory, and passed by Russian units but did not attempt to make contact with them: they were no longer an army, but fragments of human flotsam – clinging to one another, pushing one another aside into the mud, snatching each other's food, falling, shot down by officers striving to halt the retreat, and shooting back at the officers to clear a path for themselves. Amid this disorderly torrent there were pockets of astonishing stability: detachments, isolated and without hope of assistance, that dug shelters, gathered arms, and prepared their defense.
When the running noose was drawn tight and every direction became equally dangerous to take, they hid among the dead on a battlefield. The German regiments passed by just a few yards from them – sometimes the mocking laughter of a harmonica floated over on the breeze – but there were so many bodies strewn across the plain, in the trenches, behind the shattered timbers of a fortified position, that it would have taken a whole army to flush out these two living men: the tall red-haired Pole, stretched out in a shell crater, and the dark-haired Frenchman, watching the trucks drive past with half-closed eyes. At night, to forget about the rustling of the wings ceaselessly flapping above the corpses, they talked at length in their habitual mixture of Polish, Russian, German, and French. They were both amazed to see the Germans already thrusting so deeply into the heart of Russia. "If they continue like this," observed Witold, "they'll cut off the Volga. And for the Russians the Volga is like…" He drew the edge of his hand across his throat, by the carotid artery. They also noted that for weeks now there had no longer been any Russian planes to be seen in the sky.
At the start of the winter they were captured, and then adopted, by a group of partisans living in an encampment hidden away in the forest and marshland. Once the period of suspicion had passed, their involvement was accepted, and Jacques Dorme now discovered an invisible war, tucked away beneath the humus of the forest; an often clumsy struggle, since it was waged by elderly peasants armed with ancient rifles, but which in the long term wore down the enemy more than conventional attacks would have done. He also noted that in this war an infinitely more violent hatred prevailed than he had experienced in the air. On one occasion they succeeded in driving the Germans out of a village and found a crowd of naked women and children standing upright at a crossroads under falling snow: transformed beneath a stream of water into a cluster of frozen bodies. This was, no doubt, the response to what could sometimes be seen at roadsides: a German soldier stripped bare, an ice statue as well, with an uplifted, frozen arm pointing in the direction marked on a sign hung about his neck: "Berlin." Or had the idea for this come first from the occupying power? Catching the look of a peasant who had recognized his wife in the group turned to ice, Jacques Dorme perceived that this question had by now become meaningless.
In March 1942, an aircraft that came to deliver arms to the partisan camps took the two pilots on board. As the plane became airborne, they started singing for joy. Jacques Dorme no longer knew what language he was singing in.
Here was how they had pictured the end of their odyssey: an airfield, a row of fighter planes, mechanics busying themselves with the aircraft, and a squadron commander asking them to show what they could do, before accepting them.
What happens to them is not totally remote from what they had hoped for. There is a terrain suggestive of an airfield but empty; all that can be seen is the outline of a Russian Pe-2 bomber without its undercarriage, its fuselage riddled with holes. A few wooden huts, which serve as hangars, but not a single mechanic at work there. There is, however, a bustle of soldiers, who seem to be preparing to evacuate the area. And planes can be heard in the sky above the town. The pilots recognize them: "Junkers 87. Yes, dive-bombers…" They are then locked up in one of the hangars and try not to interpret this as a bad sign. The door opens: flanked by two soldiers, the person whom they had hoped would be the squadron commander appears. He is a thin little man, dressed in black leather, with a shoulder belt. His greatcoat and boots gleam in the sun. He does not greet them, announces that they will be interrogated separately, points at Witold, and says to the guards: "Bring him…"
Jacques Dorme watches what happens through a broad crack between the planks of the wall. In the middle of the courtyard a wooden table and two benches can be seen. The man in black leather sits down, Witold prepares to do the same but the soldiers seize him and force him to stand. The place suddenly begins to look like one of those indeterminate backyards we wander through in our nightmares. There is that table, in bright sunlight, on the trampled snow. Soldiers carry crates, cans of gasoline, cooking pans; they cross the courtyard, paying no attention to the interrogation, and disappear at the other end. The roar of the aircraft sometimes becomes deafening, then stops for a moment, and one can hear the noisy trickle of drops sliding off the roof, still heavy with ice. The man in leather shouts an order and the scurrying of the carriers comes to a halt. All that can be seen now is the interrogation table and an army truck parked under a tree.
When the aircraft noise fades, Jacques Dorme manages to catch certain words but senses that, more than the words, it is the difference between these two men that tells and will determine the outcome: the pilot, tall, with an open face and a firm voice; the man in black, very neat, despite the springtime mud, staring at the Pole with unconcealed hatred. At one moment their voices are raised. To overcome the droning of the dive-bombers, Jacques Dorme tells himself. But the tone continues to harden even when silence returns. He sees the man in black leather stand up, his two fists leaning on the table. Witold shouts and waves his hands, the soldiers poke him in the ribs with their submachine guns. Jacques Dorme hears the Pole yelling Stalin's name in a contemptuous outburst. The man in black stands up again, his mouth twists, hisses, "You filthy spy…" several times, and he suddenly starts to draw his revolver. The seconds become unbelievably long. Witold and the two soldiers watch him doing it, unmoving. To Jacques Dorme it seems as if this fixity of stares lasts for at least a minute. The man grasps the gun, everyone has time to realize what is happening, Witold has time to lick his lips. And the shot is fired, then another.