Wine And War: The French, The Nazis And The Battle For France's Greatest Treasure Part 6

So, over the next two years, Monmousseaux conducted a traffic in human beings, ferrying Resistance leaders in and out of the Occupied Zone in his wine barrels. As each mission was completed, he would put his barrels back together, fill them with wine and return home. The Germans never discovered what he was doing.

By now, incidents along railway lines had become an almost daily occurrence. Cars were derailed, s.h.i.+pments of wine, food and other goods bound for Germany disappeared or were being destroyed.

Nearly every week, stationmaster Gaillard had to notify his German bosses in Dijon that another s.h.i.+pment of goods was missing. One week, he reported that a crate of wine arriving in his station weighed substantially less than it did when it was first loaded onto the train. The following week, Gaillard's report was even worse. "I am returning to you a case of wrapped but totally empty food packages," he wrote. "They were supposed to contain 37 kilos of foodstuffs, but they do not. Also missing is one 50-kilo sack of salt."

Incidents of stealing and outwitting the Germans had become so frequent that those involved sometimes found themselves tripping over each other. In Bordeaux, for example, a local Resistance group spotted a train loaded with wine for Berlin and decided to liberate its contents. "They pillaged it neatly," one Bordelais remembered.

Once home, all were thrilled to discover that the bottles they had swiped came from some of the best vintage years and greatest chteaux. Immediately, they began uncorking a few of the bottles to celebrate their success. Then, one by one, their faces fell. The wine was ghastly. Bordeaux negociants had beaten the Resistance to the punch, gluing high-cla.s.s labels on bottles that were filled with nothing but plonk.

STATIONMASTER'S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: A large container of wine bottles has just arrived at my station. Please tell me what you would like me to do with them. They are all empty. Waiting for a useful response. Henri Gaillard.

Defying the Germans was a dangerous game. In Bordeaux, a man was shot and killed when he raised a clenched fist as German soldiers were staging a parade. Another was executed for cutting telephone wires.

Even the Hugels of Alsace, who "fobbed off" poor-quality wine on the Germans whenever possible, realized they had to be careful. "If we got an order from the Platterhof, the guest house of Hitler, we always sent our best wine," Georges Hugel said. "We usually received two orders a year from the Platterhof and most of the time those orders were very precise. There were a lot of people there, not Hitler, though, who appreciated good wine. We didn't dare cross them."

Others, especially those who were young like seventeen-year-old Gerald Boevers, were more daring. Boevers, who lived in the champagne-producing village of Louvois, was bored. It was July 14, Bastille Day, but Vichy authorities had banned all traditional celebrations, fearing they might lead to anti-German demonstrations. Boevers and three friends decided to celebrate anyway. They found several metal containers and filled them with gun powder from hunting ammunition they had hidden from the Germans. Someone then struck a match while the others ran for cover.

"It was a pretty big explosion," said Boevers, "big enough to bring the police and a bunch of soldiers down on us." Boevers and the others were taken immediately to Gestapo headquarters where, for the rest of that day and night, they were interrogated and severely beaten. "At one point," said Boevers, "a man from the Gestapo told me, 'If you were eighteen, we would have shot you.' It was the only time I was glad I was too young to join the French army."

Another young Frenchman, Marcel de Gallaix, also decided to take some chances. Marcel was a lawyer who specialized in property rights. Despite his wife's fears, he agreed to represent winegrowers in Burgundy who wanted to challenge German requisitions and confiscations. To reach his clients, he often had to cross the Demarcation Line, an exercise that was both nerve-wracking and time-consuming. Trains could be held up for hours while pa.s.sengers and cars were searched. By the time Marcel finally reached his destination, he discovered another problem: no one had any money. "That's okay," he said. "You can pay me with wine."

So on each trip, he went home with a satchel full of good Burgundies-all in unmarked bottles. "That way he could tell the Germans it was merely some table wine he had picked up," his wife Gertrude said. "Maybe weeks or days later, we would get a packet of labels, sometimes in the mail, sometimes someone would bring them to the apartment. Goodness, did that wine ever do marvelous things for those awful wartime meals!"

By the winter of 1941, which was one of the coldest ever, conditions of life in both zones of France "had declined from austerity to severe want," according to historian Robert Paxton. With imports cut off, oil and coal supplies dwindled. According to Jean-Bernard Delmas of Chteau Haut-Brion, "You got so cold you couldn't think of anything else." Jean-Bernard was in grade school at the time. "I will never forget how cold it was in our cla.s.sroom. We wore our coats all day. The teacher would have us run around the cla.s.sroom every few minutes just to warm up."

STATIONMASTER'S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: I would like to remind you that it is now December and my toilet is still not fixed. I am also attaching my list of missing freight for this week: seven packages of groceries, weight 210 kilos. Please follow up on this as quickly as possible. Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.

Food had become everyone's overriding concern. German requisitions had created desperate shortages, not only for ordinary people but also for those in the Resistance who were hiding in the woods and hills.

Fortunately, there were people like Jean and Madeleine Casteret, vineyard-workers-turned-cattle-rustlers. The Casterets lived in St. Yzans, not far from Chteau Loudenne, which the Germans once considered using as a brothel. Now they were raising cattle and growing food for their soldiers there.

"We did our rustling at night after the Germans had gone to bed," Jean said. "The Resistance would send us a coded signal over the radio and we'd set off." They would sneak over to Loudenne and quietly herd as many animals as they could toward the nearby woods where the Maquis would be waiting. "It was dangerous because you just never knew when one of the guards might spot us and wake everyone up, but it was enormously satisfying to narguer les allemands (stick it to the Germans)."

Even Henri Gaillard may have felt a tinge of satisfaction from time to time.

STATIONMASTER'S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: I have the honor to inform you that train 9305, which was due at 2:30 P.M., has been halted at kilometer 45 because of the arrival on the tracks of two cows. It would appear that someone opened the doors of several box cars and let the animals loose. Some have disappeared. Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.

FIVE.

The Growling Stomach GERTRUDE DE GALLAIX WAS IN A HURRY. IT WAS just after six in the morning, but she knew that long lines of women and children would already be forming at her neighborhood market.

Grabbing her shopping basket and book of ration tickets, Gertrude rushed from her third-floor Paris apartment down the spiral staircase to the street below. In her basket was an egg carrier (no merchant had cartons) and a filet, a crocheted string bag, to hold any vegetables she could buy. There were also two empty wine bottles, ones she and her husband Marcel had finished off during the week. Because of a bottle shortage, Gertrude knew that no merchant would sell her more wine unless she had empties to return.

Gertrude turned left from her apartment building and headed south down the street, rue Boissiere, toward Place d'Iena, two blocks away. Although there was only a hint of dawn, the streets were already busy. A street sweeper wielding a twig broom opened a fire hydrant to flush litter he had swept from the sidewalk into the gutter. A knife sharpener, standing by the curb with his cart and whetstone, rang a bell, crying, "Knives, scissors, anything for sharpening? Very cheap!"

As Gertrude continued along Boissiere, she glanced to her right. On rue du Bouquet de Longchamp, two German soldiers were standing guard. Gertrude gave a little shudder. That was where the Commissariat de Police was located and where she, an American, was required to register at least once every day. Though married to a Frenchman, the Germans considered her an enemy alien and insisted on knowing her whereabouts at all times.

Gertrude had nearly reached the intersection at Place d'Iena when she realized something was wrong. Although it was the biggest market in the 16th Arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, there were no lines, no queues of frantic shoppers trying to get their marketing done before children had to be taken to school, no old grandmothers or grandfathers holding a place in line for their sons and daughters. No one. As she got closer, she discovered why. There was no food. By 6:05 A.M., whatever had been brought in that day from the country had already been picked over and was gone.

More shocking, there was not a drop of wine. The s.p.a.ce where the wine merchant usually set up his stand was as empty as the bottles in Gertrude's basket.

"Food was one thing, but a wine shortage? In France? That is something I never thought I would see," Gertrude later recalled.

The wine shortage, which was being felt throughout France by 1941, was but one of many caused by the n.a.z.is in their drive to make Germany self-sufficient and independent of imports. By requisitioning most of France's raw materials, finished products, especially its food and wine, Hitler believed Germany would be in a stronger position to win the war. The Fhrer put his heir apparent, Field Marshal Hermann Gring, in charge of requisitions. Gring, who weighed nearly three hundred pounds and was called "Fat Stuff" behind his back, could not have been more pleased. "The French are so stuffed with food that it is really a disgrace," he said. "This is the secret of their wit and gaiety. Without this wealth of food, they would not be so happy."

Immediately, Gring began systematically stripping France of her bounty: wheat from the Ile de France, cheese and vegetables from the Loire Valley, fruit from the orchards of Normandy, Charolais beef from Burgundy and, most of all, trainload after trainload of wine, thousands of bottles of which found their way into the field marshal's personal cellar.

As head of Economic Planning for Occupied Lands, Gring had virtual economic omnipotence. One of his first moves in his new job was to bar the French from Paris's luxury restaurants, which he had exempted from most wine restrictions and whose wine cellars he kept stocked to meet the demands of their German clientele. "It's for us that Maxim's and La Tour d'Argent must make the best cuisine," he said. "Three or four first-cla.s.s restaurants reserved for German officers and soldiers will be perfect, but nothing for the French. They don't need that kind of food."

Had he stopped there, it might have been seen as just a slap in the face. Instead, he delivered a kick to the stomach, declaring French people would have to make do on 1,200 calories a day, half the number an average person needs to survive. Older people, those the Germans considered less productive, were given ration books limiting them to 850 calories a day.

Gring's moves sparked deep resentment, especially among winemakers, winegrowers and others connected with France's wine trade. Leon Douarche, vice president of the French Winegrowers a.s.sociation, complained that Gring was s.n.a.t.c.hing wine away from those who need it most. "The old and ill need wine," he declared. "It's an excellent food for them; it's easily digested and a vital source of vitamins and minerals. It's the best elixir for guaranteeing a long life that has ever been invented."

Douarche's message struck a chord. Medical doctors throughout the country called on German and Vichy authorities to provide for a more equitable distribution of wine in order to compensate for the loss of calories. Those engaged in "intellectual work," they said, should be ent.i.tled to half a liter of wine a day; manual laborers should have at least a liter and, in some cases, a liter and a half (two full bottles) as long as it was consumed with meals; women should receive one-third less than men.

To underscore how desperate the situation was, the doctors cited a visit they made to a nursing home where they found several elderly patients pretending to be near death. "We asked them why they were doing that. We said, 'Don't you want to get well, don't you want to go home?' They replied, 'No, here if the staff thinks you are dying, they give you wine with your lunch twice a week.' "

The doctors concluded their report with a warning: "It would be a mistake to refuse wine to those who are truly ill. It can lead to a lack of equilibrium."

Their warning and recommendations were ignored.

For the first time since the siege of Paris in 1870, signs of severe malnutrition appeared in France. Although France still produced more food than any other European country, it was now the worst-nourished, and everyone felt it. "We were obsessed with food," said Gertrude de Gallaix, "it was all we could think of."

Gertrude threw out her geraniums and began growing vegetables on her balcony. "Some of my neighbors raised chickens and rabbits on theirs. One even had a goat tethered to the railing so she would have milk for the baby."

In the countryside, the situation was slightly better. At Chteau Siran, for instance, there had always been a vegetable garden, but as food shortages grew worse, it took on much greater importance, according to May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing. "In addition to the vineyards, our lives increasingly revolved around the garden. Our first concern was always the garden."

We arise every morning at 6:30, not one minute later [she wrote in her diary]. After making our beds and before having breakfast, we water the vegetable garden. Our everyday life is marked by a total lack of basic goods, little heating, a very restricted diet with no sugar, little bread, almost no meat, b.u.t.ter does not exist. . . . We live according to the rhythm of the seasons. The harvest of plums for jam made with very little sugar; it is bitter and does not keep long. We grind corn to make a rough flour which serves as a base for most of our food. We roast barley to make fake coffee.

It was the kind of diet and lifestyle that prevailed throughout Bordeaux. Many winegrowers planted corn and millet between their rows of vines so they would have something to feed their animals. To feed themselves, some ripped out vines to make room for bigger gardens. But the gravelly soil, which was perfect for vines because it provided good drainage and forced the roots to grow deep, was inhospitable to vegetables. Whereas vines grew best when they were made to suffer, vegetables needed to be pampered.

One day, Grandmother Miailhe decided that her family, which had been putting in long days in their vineyard and garden, could use a bit of pampering as well. She announced they were going on a picnic. She had picked some tomatoes and radishes that morning and had saved some corn bread from the night before, and now she packed it in a basket with a bit of jam as well. May-Eliane and the other children could hardly wait to get started.

Hopping on their bicycles, they headed off down a meandering dirt road that took them past vineyards and through shaded pine woods toward Chteau Cantemerle, three miles away. It was a pleasant ride. The sun was s.h.i.+ning, birds were singing and, best of all, no Germans were in sight. When they reached Cantemerle, one of the oldest properties in Bordeaux, a half hour later, everyone was in high spirits. The chteau was an ideal spot for such an outing, surrounded by tall oak trees and a large, lovely park. Adults chattered about the weather, their vineyards and the war, while the children played cache-cache (hide-and-seek) and other games. Even lunch was a kind of game.

We began running around chasing after frogs [May-Eliane wrote in her diary]. That is what we ate: frogs. We just ran around and picked them up off the ground.

Some games were more serious than others. In the summer of 1940, France was invaded a second time, this time by potato bugs called doryph.o.r.es. The "invasion" was especially acute in Burgundy, where huge potato fields were under attack. The Germans, who were s.h.i.+pping French potatoes back to the Fatherland, were irritated that France had not yet eradicated the pest. To solve the problem, schoolteachers were ordered to send their pupils into the fields to collect bugs. Robert Drouhin remembers his teacher handing him and his cla.s.smates jars, saying, "See who can collect the most." For the children, it felt like a holiday as they scurried out of their cla.s.sroom into the field and began picking bugs off the potatoes. "At the end of each day, our teacher had to turn the bugs we had collected over to a German soldier," Robert said. "I don't know what the Germans would have done if we hadn't collected enough bugs."

Before long the French, who called Germans les Boches, or goons, had a new nickname for their oppressors: les doryph.o.r.es. "Ja," sneered one soldier who heard the pejorative name, "we're the doryph.o.r.es all right. We will eat the potatoes and you will eat nothing."

Or next to nothing. By 1942, said one historian, the real voice of France had become "the growling stomach."

To a.s.suage the beast, nearly everything became fair game. In Bordeaux, a reporter from a local newspaper was cutting across the city's Square Laffite on his way to work when he suddenly stopped. It seemed awfully quiet. Where were the pigeons? He began to count. Later, he wrote in the newspaper, "The pigeon population has plummeted from 5,000 to 89." Pigeon rti had become a staple on many Bordelais' tables.

And that was not all.

"We were so hungry that we ate the goldfish in the pool," remembered a young American who arrived in France in 1940. Varian Fry, who was thirty-two, had been sent to the port of Ma.r.s.eille on the Mediterranean coast on a mission of mercy. His a.s.signment from the Emergency Rescue Committee of New York was to help artists and intellectuals flee the n.a.z.is.

Word of his operation with its promise of false identification papers and escape abroad spread quickly, and people began lining up on the stairs outside his office. But smuggling people out of the country took time, and soon Fry had a houseful of people to feed and care for until the necessary arrangements could be made. Among his "guests" were Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Hannah Arendt and Max Ernst. There would be more than 1,500 in all before Fry too had to flee France.

"What helped a lot was wine," he said. "As food grew scarcer, we drank more and more of it. Occasionally on Sat.u.r.day evenings, we would buy ten or twelve bottles of Chteauneuf-du-Pape, Hermitage, Mercurey, Moulin--Vent, Julienas, Chambertin, Bonnes Mares or Musigny and have an evening of drinking and singing."

Over the next thirteen months, however, the situation deteriorated. "For several days, we had no bread at all, and practically no meat," Fry wrote in a memoir. That is when they remembered the goldfish in the pond. "But the worst of it was that it also became harder and harder to find wine," he lamented.

That was true even in Bordeaux, the largest fine-wine district on earth. "The Bordelais have stopped drinking their wine!" exclaimed one newspaper. They did not have much choice. With so much wine being requisitioned, many restaurants limited the amount they served to customers. Some stopped serving wine altogether, prompting one patron to complain, "We have to drink so much water these days that it feels like Noah's Ark here!"

But German requisitions were only part of the reason for the wine shortage. Many growers were no longer able to get their wine to market because the Germans had seized their trucks. Those who still had vehicles could not drive very far because gasoline was severely rationed.

New laws also cut into the amount of wine available. Growers were ordered to distill part of their wine into fuel and industrial alcohol, which the Germans needed as solvents and antifreeze for their motor vehicles as well as a basis for their explosives. Those producing more than 5,000 hectoliters of wine a year were ordered to distill one-half of their harvest.

Those regulations, coupled with unfavorable weather, lack of labor and a shortage of chemicals to treat vines guaranteed that wine production would drop, and drop sharply. In 1940, production fell nearly 30 percent. By 1942, production was barely half of what it had been in 1939.

Among those severely affected were the Miailhes, who owned five vineyards in Bordeaux: Chteaux Siran, Palmer, Pichon-Longueville-Comtesse de Lalande, Ducru-Beaucaillou (until 1943) and Coufran. "But there's an old saying here," recalled May-Eliane years later. "The more chteaux you own, the poorer you are. Certainly at that time, n.o.body had any money and that included us."

Even before the war, the Miailhes' vineyards, like so many others, were already in terrible condition because of the recession in the 1920s and the poor-quality harvests of the 1930s.

In the spring of 1942, Edouard Miailhe, May-Eliane's father, informed the family that they could no longer afford to pay their workers and would have to sell one of their farms. He also warned they would have to uproot many of their vines because they were unable to take care of them.

But that was just the beginning. That year, the Germans requisitioned tens of thousands of farm horses-30,000 from one wine region alone-for transporting soldiers and materiel to the front. Edouard's brother Louis was ordered to bring all of the Miailhe horses to the square in front of the town hall. He was upset but held his tongue. With two families of Italian Jews still hidden in one of their chteaux, the last thing he wanted to do was call attention to himself.

When he arrived, Louis found the square filled with horses belonging to other winegrowers, the animals pus.h.i.+ng and neighing their displeasure at being packed into close quarters. As disgruntled growers held the reins, Germans armed with pens and clipboards carefully examined the horses, checking their teeth, stroking their flanks, deciding which were worth taking. Some growers tried to trick the Germans by putting stones in their horses' hooves to make them limp.

Finally, Miailhe's name was called. "These yours?" an officer asked, glancing at the six horses Louis was holding. Miailhe nodded. The German began circling, stopping at one point to lift one of the horse's hooves. After making a few notes, he remarked, "They're good," and signaled another soldier to take them away.

"It nearly killed Uncle Louis. He was so attached to his horses," May-Eliane said. Her uncle had worked long hours with them, training them to walk a straight line through the vines and to pull with just the right force so that the point of the plow would bite deep enough into the rocky soil to clear weeds but not so deep that it would damage the roots of the vines.

While some winegrowers had mules or oxen to replace their horses, the Miailhes were left with only cows. It was a pitiful sight. The cows strained at their yokes, bellowing in protest, as they struggled to drag the plow between the vines. "Oh, those poor cows, they had a terrible life, and they had to give milk too!" recalled May-Eliane.

Loss of their horses, however, was not the only problem the Miailhes had to face. There was no copper sulfate either. The powdery substance, sometimes called bluestone because it turned workers and vineyards blue when carelessly sprayed, was used to combat oidium and mildew, fungal diseases that attacked grapevines in wet years. The chemical had all but vanished from the marketplace after the Germans requisitioned France's copper and other metals for its war industry.

That was when Louis Miailhe asked his son Jean to drop out of school. "I need your help," he explained. "I want you to stay home and work with me."

Jean, sixteen, took a close look at his father, and saw a tired man who was aging too quickly, his heart condition exacerbated by the strain of two years of German occupation, two years of struggling to keep his family fed and the vineyards producing. As much as he loved school, especially his science cla.s.ses, Jean knew he could not refuse.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

His father replied, "Find a way to make copper sulfate."

When the occupation began, the Germans had allowed vignerons to exchange copper products for copper sulfate. Growers scoured their homes and cellars for whatever they could find, copper wire, old pots and pans and finally even decorative ornaments they stripped off their walls. But that exchange system quickly became impractical, and the copper sulfate ran out.

Jean pored over books and publications looking for ideas. Most of what he came up with was laughable. "Here is how to deal with your copper sulfate shortage," said the Bulletin International du Vin. "Treat vines less often, reduce the dose, avoid waste by directing sprays with greater care, let women and children do the work to make up for the lack of male workers."

In frustration, Jean paid a visit to his old chemistry teacher, explaining that he needed to find a way to make ten tons of copper sulfate every four months. "My teacher knew all kinds of formulas and was eager to try them out." Before anything could be tried, however, they had to find copper. The Germans had confiscated all the metal they could get their hands on in Bordeaux, including a group of bronze statues commemorating the French Revolution which had stood at Place Quinconces. They were melted down and s.h.i.+pped to Germany.

Fortunately, Jean's family had a good friend in the Belgian consul general in Bordeaux. When Jean explained what he needed, the consul agreed to help. Belgium was still getting copper from its colonies in Africa. In exchange for wine, the consul agreed to smuggle some copper into Bordeaux on trucks that hauled wine and wine bottles to and from Belgium.

Jean and his chemistry teacher were now ready. They set up their "very simple, primitive laboratory" at Chteau Coufran, where Jean's family lived. The old farm building they used was far enough from the main house to be safe from the curious eyes of anyone pa.s.sing through.

It was a bad choice.

In 1943, Coufran suddenly became part of the zone interdite, a no-go zone the Germans set up along the Bordeaux coast as a defense against an Allied invasion. They ordered the Miailhes out of their chteau and moved German soldiers in. From now on, the authorities said, you will need a special pa.s.s to come on the property, even to work your vineyards.

But with the lab already built and all his supplies at Coufran, Jean decided to forge ahead anyway, sneaking past the German lines at night, or hiding at the end of the day and not leaving when work stopped in the vineyard. Working at night helped hide the smoke from the lab, and the lab itself was still far enough away from the house to keep the smell of sulfur from German noses, as long as the wind was in the right direction.

For a few months, all went smoothly. Hunched over test tubes and other equipment, Jean mixed nitric and sulfuric acid and applied it to the copper he had acc.u.mulated. Soon he had made an impressive amount of copper sulfate. His father was thrilled.

But then, abruptly, the Belgian copper supply was cut off. The consul told Jean it had become too dangerous, that the Germans were becoming suspicious and the smuggling would have to stop.

Jean did not know what to do-until one day when he spotted an itinerant sc.r.a.p metal dealer on the street. The dealer admitted he was getting metal "here and there" and would be happy to supply Jean with copper if Jean supplied him with wine. "It was our little cash-and-carry deal," Jean later recalled. "I didn't ask any questions and we didn't exchange names."

Their chief problem was getting the copper to the lab. The only way was by gazogene car, regular cars which, because of fuel shortages, had been converted to run on burning wood. "We would get into our cars and start for Coufran from Bordeaux. Every hill, even little ones, we would have to get out and push the car," Jean said. "I don't know how many times on each trip we would have to stop and get out the pick to break up the charcoal that was blocking the engine. Those gazogenes were awful. They were so slow and we were always nervous and worried about being stopped and searched by the Germans even though we had pa.s.ses to work in the vineyards."

Although he was aware of the risks, Jean found making copper sulfate under the noses of the Germans exciting, even exhilarating. "I really wanted to be involved in the war and that way I felt as though I was."

But two things happened almost simultaneously that brought the reality of war to Jean's doorstep. While working at the lab one night, he received news from a friend that his sc.r.a.p metal dealer had been arrested. It turned out that the copper the dealer had been supplying to Jean had been stolen from a German warehouse.

Jean was terrified, unsure what would happen next. Would the sc.r.a.p metal dealer talk? Would the Germans come for him next? He had been arrested once for being out after curfew and was released only because a friend of his father's who was from a German family spoke up for him. "It was a moment of absolute panic," Jean said. "I could not sleep for days I was so nervous."

When weeks pa.s.sed and nothing happened, he began to relax. But not for long. In the wee hours of the morning when he was still at the lab, Jean was startled by a burst of antiaircraft fire, followed by a deafening crash. After quickly shutting down his lab, he stepped outside. There, in the middle of the vineyard, was the burning wreckage of an American plane. Minutes later, the sound of barking dogs could be heard as German patrols came out of the chteau and began searching for the downed fliers.

Jean dashed back to his lab and began dismantling it as quickly as possible, hiding pieces in the hayloft and wherever else he could, even burying parts in the vineyard. Then he quietly slipped back to Bordeaux.

Jean Miailhe's career as a chemist had come to an end.

G.o.d made man-

Frail as a bubble;