The Battle of Brittany

The Past Ever Present

It was Madame Boufleur who made the discovery.

She lived in two rooms at the back of the museum with an antiquated bathroom outside in the yard. One room was her bedroom and the other her kitchen, although it had a couple of tatty armchairs in one corner with a low table in between. She spent very little time in her rooms, sleeping only a few hours at a time and spending most of her day and night in the museum.

She pottered. She improved. She adjusted and readjusted.

And she thought about the past.

The night following Max's second visit, after they had shared a bottle of good wine in the smaller of the two exhibition rooms, she was doing her evening rounds. They seemed to take longer each day; not that she was slowing down, rather she became more absorbed, like a headmistress touring the classrooms, tinkering with fondness when the children had gone for the day.

She paused by the war exhibition, hastily put together over the last few days. There had been something there before, the bullet for instance. But, after the phone call with Berrince, in which he had accepted her report but refused to recommit to the payments, she had worked tirelessly to create something out of what had been neglected before. It was her weapon against him, her way of hitting back. Danegeld, had purchased a forty-year truce; when the payments stopped, hostilities resumed.

Her efforts came at a cost. Her arthritic right hand ached from writing the cards recording and explaining each event and artefact, the personal touch she gave to her endeavours.

She found some faded photographs that nipped at her memory. They were British soldiers, both caught in action and posing. She remembered there had been a hundred or so soldiers, or commandos as they were called. They had landed with another hundred sailors, almost emptying the stricken corvette. That made two hundred against the Germans. How many Germans had there been? Trumpf had a dozen permanent soldiers reporting to him but, if she recalled correctly, two were on leave. Including Trumpf there were just eleven German soldiers.

But it had not been that simple for Berrince had been there. Things always got complicated when Berrince was around. Who knew how many men he had? She paused in her rounds to count those she remembered, sometimes recalling the wife's name rather than the husband's. She got to ninety easily.

A rough rule of thumb, if she could recall ninety there would have been three or four times as many.

Maybe four hundred Breton nationalists had sided with the Nazis. So, how had the British won? She ran through the various advantages, as if she had a doctorate in military history and was summarising for her class.

"The defenders had eleven first rate soldiers and let's say three hundred Bretons. Of these, maybe a quarter had direct experience of warfare. The attackers were a hundred crack troops plus the sailors, who weren't used to street-fighting. There's the surprise element that's so often decisive in any attack. But the British forego any surprise when their ship limped into the bay four hours earlier."

On balance, the defenders should have won. "It must have been the ferociousness of the Scottish commandos that tipped the balance."

They were Scottish, just like Max Hamilton-Stays, her new friend after the remarkably successful visit earlier. She had marked him as English but he had gently corrected her, reminding her of their joint Celtic ancestry.

Tomorrow, she would ask Max what Scottish commandos were like. Perhaps they went berserk, like warriors of old. Perhaps, when they put on their funny hats and marched to the tune of their bagpipes, they became crazed with blood-lust and nothing could stand in their way.

She looked again at the old photographs, all buried for four decades. Berrince had seen to that.

But she didn't like thinking of Berrince for that reminded her that the cash hadn't come.