We don't walk very long. There's a van parked along a dirt road used by loggers; as we approach, the back opens and a young guy motions for me to climb aboard. I reach for his hand, climb in, and we take off.
It's pitch black in the back, and my companion speaks no English, but I don't have to be told that this is it: we're driving south, heading toward the Pyrenees. We drive for several hours before the van lurches to a stop. It is early evening, but dark and drizzly, and we are parked against a wall in what seems to be a backstreet in some village. A Frenchman quickly takes me across the street where another truck is parked, its engine idling. The moment I hop in the back, the truck takes off. There are four or five other guys seated on benches, and nobody says a word, mostly because they are too busy hanging on while the driver barrels down twisting backstreets, doing fifty or better. I hear the guy seated next to me mutter, "Jesus Christ." I'm figuring I'm in with a bunch of bomber guys who will be crossing the Pyrenees together.
Soon the gears up front are constantly switching between second and first as we begin to travel up steep grades. It would be nice to be driven across the mountains into Spain. A flashlight is switched on by a guy seated at the end of one of the benches. He hunches down on the floor between the rest of us. He's a Frenchman who speaks good English. "We're just outside Lourdes," he tells us, "heading into the foothills." He distributes hand-drawn maps to each of us, detailing our routes up and over. "You can either go together as a team, or pair off. It will probably take you four to five days to cross, depending on the weather. It's been rather mild, so I don't think you'll encounter any blizzards. But it will be rough-I won't deceive you about that. The most dangerous part will be just before you cross the Spanish frontier. It's heavily patrolled by the Germans, and there are all sorts crossing over-smugglers, refugees, military personnel like yourselves. Your best bet is to cross over at night, as late as possible. We've mapped out a southerly crossing-the farther south, the better, because the Spaniards up north have a nasty habit of turning in American pilots to the Gestapo and collecting a few hundred francs reward. If that should happen, you can expect to be tortured to tell all that you know about us, then taken out and shot. So, please be careful."
I notice a pile of bulging knapsacks stashed against the wall of the cab. When we finally stop, well past midnight, in the middle of nowhere, each of us grabs a knapsack and climbs out. "You're at the starting point," the guy tells us. "There's a woodsman's shed about a hundred yards directly ahead. You can use that. But no fires and no talking. This place is patrolled. Start out at first light. Today is March twenty-third. With luck, you can expect to be in Spain by the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth." He wishes us well and then takes off in the truck.
We spend what's left of the night shivering in the dark hut. By the first light, we set out in the rain deciding to at least start out together and see how it goes. By noon, two of us have made it to the timberline in gale winds. The other two are lagging far behind, not even in sight. My companion's name is Pat. He's a lieutenant, a navigator on a B-24 shot down over France. The French provide bread, cheese, and chocolate in our knapsacks. Pat and I eat and wait for the others to catch up. We agree that if they can't hack it and reach us in half an hour, we'll go on without them. Pat is big and strong; we wait more than forty minutes, then push on together.
The Pyrenees make the hills back home look like straightaways. We are crossing slightly south of the central ridge that forms the boundary line between occupied France and neutral Spain. The highest peaks are eleven thousand feet, but we figure we won't get higher than six or seven thousand; the trouble is we are up to our knees in wet, heavy snow. We cross ridges so slick with ice that we cross them on the seat of our pants. At first, we rest every hour, then every half-an-hour; but as we climb into the thinning air, we are stopping every ten or fifteen minutes, cold and exhausted. The climb is endless, a bitch of bitches, and I've got to wonder how many of our guys actually make it across these mountains and how many feed the crows that caw overhead.
We sleep and rest when we can, using outcroppings to protect us somewhat from the constant, freezing wind. Our feet are numb, and we both worry about frostbite. The French have given us four pairs of wool socks. We wear two pair at a time, but our boots leak. By the end of the second day, we're not sure how long we've been up here; by the third day, we wonder if we are lost; late into the fourth day, we're almost ready to give up. We should be near the frontier, but low clouds restrict visibility to less than fifty feet. It's four in the afternoon, and we are so exhausted that we catnap between each step we take, staggering like two drunks. I'm thinking that this is the kind of situation that produces fatal accidents, when we reach the top of a ridge and practically bump into a lumberman's cabin. We approach the front door cautiously, my pistol out, but my finger is so numb that I doubt I could squeeze the trigger. The place is empty.
I just crumple on the floor. Pat takes off his shoes and hangs his soaked woolen socks on the branches of a bush. The two of us sleep side by side on the bare wooden floor. And while we sleep, a German patrol passes in front of the cabin. They see Pat's socks hanging on the bush out front. The bastards ask no questions. They just unsling their rifles and begin firing through the front door. The first bullets whine above my head and thud into the wall; I leap through the rear window, Pat right behind me. I hear him scream, and I grab hold of him and yank him with me as I jump on a snow-covered log slide. I'm spinning around ass over teakettle, in a cloud of snow, and it seems like two miles down to the bottom of that flume. We splash straight down into a creek.
Fortunately, the water is deep. I surface and so does Pat. I grab him and paddle across to the other side. Christ, he's gray. He's been shot in the knee, and he's bleeding to death. I tear away his pant leg and I can't believe it. It looks to me like they hit him with a nine-millimeter soft nose bullet, a dumdum because it blew away everything. His lower leg is attached to his upper leg only by a tendon. Using a penknife, I cut off that tendon. In my knapsack is a silk shirt that Gabriel's wife had made for me out of my parachute, before I left their farm to join the Maquis. I tear off a piece and tie it tightly around the stump. Then I take the shirt and wrap it two or three times around the stump and tie that. Pat is unconscious, but still breathing, and we're pretty well hidden from the Germans up above. I decide to wait till dark and then somehow drag both of us back up that mountain and get us into Spain.
Night falls early in the mountains that time of year, and thick clouds bury the stars. I can barely see the reflected ice and snow of the steep mountainside. The going is rough and treacherous, dragging both of us up that steep slope. At one point, not even halfway up, I lose both my footing and my grip on the collar of Pat's jacket, and we slide backwards more than fifty feet, slamming against a boulder. If the slope had been extreme, that would have been it for both of us, but it was gradual and we weren't sliding fast. It's very cold, but the low cloud deck prevents the temperature from really dropping and glazing the wet snow into a sheet of ice. And at least there is no wind. I stop dozens of times to hear if Patterson is still breathing. The truth is, I would be glad to let go of my one-hundred-seventy-pound bundle, but his breathing is regular, although weak. A few times I hear him moan softly.