Credit to /u/BringOnYourStorm for another great reso

"Collette!"

“Collette! Collette!” Pierre called, gesturing for his comrade to join him. From atop Grand Montrond they could see as far as the River Ain on a clear day. Colette crawled across the grass, her hair neatly pinned behind her head, and reached for the binoculars.

Colette exhaled. “Merde.”

Pierre nodded his agreement. They knew of the military buildup-- if the communists thought they could hide from them, they were no smarter than the Germans. Though ten years older, Pierre slipped back into the role he’d filled in those dreadful years. Colette, a pretty younger woman from Lille, was something of his protégé. The two had been posted atop the mountain, hidden from the air by a blind strung between two boulders, had been chatting idly when Pierre saw the column crossing the ground.

“Go, let the others know. We have an hour, maybe more. Be careful, Colette,” Pierre said, tossing her rifle to her.

Collette nodded, Pierre knew the feeling of one’s first combat. He’d felt it in 1940 when the First Army rushed into Belgium in a vain effort to stop the Germans. This would be worse than that, he knew men in that column rumbling toward them. He resumed watching.

For her part, Colette crashed through the foliage on the steep side of the mountain, descending rapidly into the little alpine town of Mijoux. Catching her breath behind a woodshed she stashed her rifle in a woodpile and picked up her bag, proceeding into the town looking to all the world to be an average 20 year old French girl. She grinned at one of the local boys, who waved back, on her way through the streets.

Situated on the mountainside on the outskirts of town was Monsieur Allard’s house, a friend to the Resistance. She stopped by the bakery and paid for some bread with some of the Resistance’s money-- she had none of her own-- and proceeded to meet M. Allard. “I need help with my homework,” she called to the schoolteacher as she knocked on his door and heard him stir. “Mathematics.”

The footsteps froze, she noted it, but he opened the door all the same. “Come in, child, let us see the equations.”

“Merci,” she said, bowing her head gratefully and offering him the bread.

In the basement M. Allard had a radio set, which Collette was trained to use. She sat behind the set and cleared her throat while M. Allard looked on. Depressing the transmit button on the microphone, she sang one of Edith Piaf’s newer tunes,

Mon Dieu qu'il y en a des croix sur cette terre

Croix de fer, croix de bois, humbles croix familières

Petites croix d'argent

Pendues sur les poitrines

Vieilles croix des couvent

Perdues parmi les ruines.

At the end she realized she was blushing and offered a smile to M. Allard, pressing the button one more time. “Um, merci et bonne nuit, mes amis.”

The moment felt almost normal. She wished it was. Colette turned off the machine and stood. M. Allard didn’t know the meaning of what she had transmitted, but she offered him a wan grin. “Stay safe, Monsieur.”

A long row of half tracks and trucks rolled up the road in the direction of Les Rousses, steadily climbing. Their intelligence placed a company of these counterrevolutionaries in the forests above Les Rousse, close to Switzerland.

Henri’s half track downshifted as it struggled to climb while exiting the town of Hauts-de-Bienne, the engine revving as it struggled up the incline. He looked up, craning his neck. High mountains were about all he could see, and a narrow wedge of sky between them. They were in a relatively tight valley.

The half track crested the hill, and for a moment the sky opened up. Then the driver, Chasseur Leval, called out. “Look out!”

Before he could react, the first thing Henri’s brain registered was heat. Terrible heat. The interior of the halftrack was bright, and the machine gunner shrieked as his uniform and, terrifyingly enough, his skin burned. Henri became suddenly aware he was on fire, too. Rough hands pulled him from his seat, and some others threw a material over him to smother the flames. The gunner, the drivers, they still screamed until a gunshot cut the sound off. Henri opened his eyes to find Corporal Garnier, his sidearm drawn.

The rest of the unit had disembarked, desperately seeking the source of the petrol bomb. They had to be close. In that moment, it looked like Corporal Garnier was punched in the chest. The rapport of a rifle followed shortly thereafter, echoing off the cliff faces and mountainsides.

“Off the road! Find cover, now!” another officer called out. The Chasseurs dragged Henri into the defilade on the side of the road behind their burning vehicle. The rest of the outfit had hurriedly disembarked.

“Garnier?” Henri asked blankly, looking at his burned right arm. The sleeve of his uniform was gone, and in its place was terribly inflamed red skin. He tried to reach for his gun, but realized it was still in the half-track. At that moment the ammunition for the .30 caliber machine gun began going off, the secondary explosions compelling them to hunker down further. Another shot rang out, and another. The medic who attempted to tend to Cpl. Garnier was pulled off the road by one of the other Chasseurs.

“I have him,” claimed another of the Chasseurs, who had leveled his rifle looking north, at the mountain above Hauts-de-Bienne. He began to fire, but they could never know if he hit his mark. The gunshots stopped from the far side of the gorge, though. Henri was more focused on his arm, which the medic tended to instead of their dying corporal. The morphine helped dull the pain, and he found himself losing the ability to focus.

A shot thudded into the bark of a tree. Philippe panted, the resistance was running for their lives and even for Chasseurs-Alpines the going was tough. Philippe returned fire, though he had yet to see more than one or two of them. More scattered gunfire followed, it seemed neither side was aiming particularly well in this terrain.

Taking a few deep breaths, Philippe emerged from cover and starting running after them. Another rifle sounded and he heard the snap of the bullet only barely missing him, so he dropped into the undergrowth. Some others from his unit caught up, and he hauled himself to his feet.

“Where’d they go?” he asked, rubbing the sweat out of his eyes.

One of the others pointed. “Up ahead! We’re on them!”

Philippe took off, still panting. He was getting too old to keep up with the younger recruits. They passed him by, darting off to the north. In a few minutes he had fallen far behind, and leaned against a tree to steady himself while he caught his breath. Then he saw the farm, down the hill. It was where he would have hidden those long years ago. He hefted his rifle and turned, mercifully walking downhill now.

At the edge of the clearing he paused, looking in the windows. Nothing yet. Slowly, as quietly as he could, he rounded the side of the barn, carefully avoiding the windows. He reached the door, said a quick prayer, and kicked it in. In a burst of feathers and hay he leapt into the room, and then he froze.

On the floor he saw a ghost. “Philippe?”

Philippe’s rifle faltered. “Guillaume?”

“Here I thought I’d be happy the next time we met,” Guillaume said, laughing weakly. He gestured to his bleeding side. “This was your doing?”

“Well, if I had known…” Philippe began to defend himself.

Guillaume held up a hand. “You would have done the same. I’m an enemy of France, now.”

“You--”

“I think we fought for different ideals of France during the war,” Guillaume observed. “I was not satisfied to trade one tyrant for another.”

Philippe let his rifle fall. “I’m sorry, my friend.”

“I am too,” Guillaume said, his voice barely a whisper.

The other resistance fighter, a woman their age, looked up from her place beside Guillaume. “What are you going to do now?”

Philippe blinked, he was startled to become aware of the tears in his eyes. By rights they should be shot, but how could he shoot his old comrade? He couldn’t turn him in, either. His rifle’s barrel touched the floor. He cleared away the tears from his cheeks with the back of his uniform’s sleeve. “I’ll lead them away,” he said quietly. “They are running north looking for you, head east or south.”

“How can we trust this communist?” the woman asked, looking at Guillaume.

Guillaume grinned sadly. “We all fight for France,” he repeated. “There was a time I trusted him with my life. I do not think enough has changed to change that.”

The campaign against the French Resistance was a difficult one, due largely to the extremely mountainous and difficult terrain on the Franco-Swiss border in which the Resistance had based itself. Spotted early on by lookouts atop the tall Grand Montrond and Resistance members hiding among the populace of the various towns around the base of the mountains, the Resistance quickly prepared for what they knew for some time was an eventuality.

Veterans of the Resistance of 1940-1944 formed the core of these cells, and through coded messages sent and received via commercial amateur radio sets acquired on either side of the border the word was spread that the communists were coming. Keenly aware that they could not fight the communists in a stand-up battle, the immediate order was to ambush and slow down the oncoming Army while the main body of the Resistance withdrew.

The Chasseurs de Cheval of the 8th Division performed the critical strike, one which may have broken the Resistance in two. Unfortunately, the year in which the Resistance had grown in these mountains gave them plenty of time to plan. A narrow pass through which the assault would have to proceed just north-west of Les Rousses was where the first ambush occurred, and through the use of petrol bombs and sniper fire they stalled the column for a little over an hour. Eventually the Chasseurs cleared the road-- a necessity in these narrow mountain passes-- but continuing on only led to another ambush, and another. The losses were minimal each time, but what it cost them was precious time. The Resistance felled trees across the road beyond Les Rousses, another time-consuming obstacle to clear under persistent sniper fire.

The holding action by the central Resistance cell bought time for the southern cells to withdraw along the mountain ridge with the goal of linking up with the northern cells. One of the two cells fought a drawn-out rearguard action with the Chasseurs de Alpins, suffering by far the heaviest casualties-- the French army would count 67 killed or captured. The plan was abandoned and the Resistance absconded over the Swiss border, using the woods to evade Swiss authorities and move north until they crossed back over the border and as far as the Army could tell disappeared among the population of Divonne-les-Bains. The other cell managed a grueling march to the Grand Montrond and beyond, fighting numerous skirmishes with the French Army around Mijoux and leaving north, crossing the Swiss border along the alpine ridge with the surviving members of the Mijoux cell.

In the far northern operation, the cells were well warned of the coming Army regiment by the broadcasts from other resistance cells. The only routes to their hideouts in the mountaintop forests were footpaths, meaning a far slower and more vulnerable advance for the French infantry. Numerous ambushes put the Army into a cautious posture, and by the time they crested the mountaintop they found their targets had long ago slipped away. Neighbors kept each other quiet about the Resistance’s whereabouts, by and large, and the Army would have to track the cell if they wished to continue the pursuit.

The northernmost cell, operating in and around Mouthe, suffered no casualties and escaped well ahead of the French infantry coming up from the south, warned by their colleagues escaping from around Foncine-le-Haut.

At the end of the operation the French Army suffered the loss of three half tracks and fifty-six men, but had driven the Resistance out of the mountains as best as they could tell. Unfortunately they could not tell very well as the residents of the region proved very tight-lipped about the whereabouts of the Resistance, though some pro-communist informants indicated they fled well to the north. The French Army is able to confirm ninety-eight dead Resistance members-- predominantly those who fell fighting the Chasseurs de Aplins and in the fighting around Mijoux-- but that cannot account for the possibility the Resistance removed the bodies of the fallen or otherwise obscured their losses in other sectors.

MAP