Chapter 259: I buried it under the stairs. Thought it might matter again.

Words : 1210 Updated : Sep 29th, 2025

Chapter 259: I buried it under the stairs. Thought it might matter again.The road to Jaca was lined with pine trees. French infantry moved down it in quiet columns, boots landing in unison, rifles kept low. Ahead, the town stood with shutters closed, windows covered, flags stripped down to bare rope. It hadn’t been held long, but it had been held hard enough for bullet scars to stay on walls, enough for locals to flinch at noise. Captain Deval’s men advanced behind two light tanks, AMR-33s. The Nationalist checkpoint at the edge of town had been abandoned. One helmet lay in the dirt, dusted with red clay. They reached the plaza by mid-afternoon. The city hall door creaked open. An old man stepped out slowly, a folded piece of cloth in his hands. He didn’t look at the tank, didn’t flinch at the rifles. "You’re French?" he asked. Deval nodded. "Second Mechanized. Aragon Line." The man handed him the folded cloth. It was the tricolor of the old Republic, worn thin, but whole. "I buried it under the stairs. Thought it might matter again." Deval took it without a word, raised his hand, and radioed command. "Jaca secured. No casualties. Locals friendly." Behind him, his soldiers began moving street to street, checking houses, offering food, not demanding it. Engineers followed. They began drawing chalk lines on walls, mapping future cable routes. They were not an army passing through. They were building into the land itself. South of Jaca, where the land flattens and the rail lines cut east and west, French engineers worked at double pace. The old freight rails had been shelled the year before, their beams bent and tracks twisted like wire. Now, under the coordination of the 3rd Engineering Division, bridges were rebuilt in hours, not days. The logistics officer coordinating the sector wrote in his log. "Spain is no longer foreign. It’s corridor." Overhead, French aircraft passed in slow, deliberate arcs. Not strafing. Not bombing. Observing. Mapping. Radioing positions. One landed at a field strip hastily converted near Ayerbe. Within thirty minutes, supplies were offloaded and the plane was up again. The scale was growing. In the hills north of Huesca, French paratroopers of the 12e Division Aéroportée dropped into a barren valley behind Nationalist lines. They encountered resistance small arms fire from dug-in militias loyal to Franco but the exchange lasted less than ten minutes. The French flanked quickly, boxed in the defenders, and took eleven prisoners without further shots. One was no older than sixteen. A sergeant shook his head. "This isn’t war," he said. "This is cleanup." They found the radio tower intact. By sundown, it was transmitting again. Short messages. Repeated intervals. "La República vive. La línea avanza." The Republic lives. The line moves. That message would be picked up in Madrid, Valencia, and even as far as Malaga by morning. At the same time, in Peraltilla, a convoy of colonial infantry from Algeria passed through a cluster of villages. Locals stood watching. No one ran. Some offered bread. Some only stared. The commander, Lieutenant Hadj Ben-Kacem, made sure none of his men spoke unless spoken to. "We don’t show force," he told them. "We show certainty." In a low barn outside the town, they discovered a cache of old Republican rifles, oiled and stored with care. An old woman told them her son left them "for when France remembered us." By the next day, those rifles were in the hands of partisans linking up with the French advance. In Zaragoza, word of the advancing front triggered panic in the rear garrisons. One colonel ordered the dynamiting of a key bridge to slow French armor. His men refused. An argument broke into shouts, then silence. That night, the colonel was found in his office, shot once behind the ear. A note pinned to his chest read. "We won’t die for old ghosts." In Pamplona, worse. A full Nationalist garrison mutinied. The officers tried to suppress it with threats of treason, but the enlisted men took the armory first. They sent a radio signal across all open frequencies. "We return to Madrid. This war is not ours." Guderian received that message while studying aerial photos outside Zaragoza. He said nothing. His aide waited for comment. "They’ve stopped believing," the aide finally offered. Guderian didn’t look up. "They believed in German steel. Now they see French weight. No contest." Elsewhere, engineers continued their work. Telephone lines were restored between Pau and Ayerbe. Trains moved again light cargo first, then fuel drums, then artillery shells. In a restored farmhouse north of Huesca, Étienne Moreau sat over a map with four division commanders. The table was marked with cigarette burns and dried coffee stains. Carmen stood nearby, watching silently. "We hold the line from Somport to Lleida," the first officer said. "That’s ninety-two kilometers of terrain." "We don’t hold it," Moreau corrected. "We live on it. We keep moving. If we sit, we rot." Another officer pointed to a red marker. "Zaragoza will need direct pressure soon." "No. Not yet." "But the lines are thin." "We cut the city, not storm it. Let it choke on its silence." Carmen stepped forward. "And if the locals suffer?" Moreau didn’t hesitate. "Then we open one corridor. Just one. No arms, only civilians. That’s the line." She nodded. Outside, rain had begun falling. It made no difference. Convoys still moved. Tents still rose. Mess lines still formed. France was not dependent on good weather. It moved regardless. In Madrid, the cabinet of President Azaña debated under dim yellow light. "We should coordinate directly with French command," one minister argued. "Moreau." "That’s the problem." They debated for hours sovereignty, strategy, future governance. One suggested full military delegation to the French. Another called it surrender without a shot fired. Azaña ended it with a wave. "You want to command? Then you go to the front. Until then, we let them march." Outside, posters appeared in the plaza overnight. Someone had stenciled them in red paint. "No es ocupación. Es regreso." It’s not occupation. It’s return. Back on the field near Ayerbe, a Nationalist detachment attempted a night raid on a French logistics column. It was poorly planned, under-armed, and outnumbered. The French forces responded in under five minutes, surrounded the attackers with mounted recon units, and fired only when fired upon. The engagement lasted twenty minutes. When the dust cleared, seventeen Nationalists lay dead. Two had surrendered. The rest fled. No French fatalities. One corporal leaned against the truck afterward, wiping his face. "They expected volunteers," he said. "Not this." His sergeant replied, "They expected memory. We brought the present." That night, a letter was written by a soldier of the 5th Armored Division, addressed to his sister in Dijon. "We haven’t bombed a church. We haven’t razed a town. We fight with precision. They’re afraid not because we’re cruel, but because we know what we’re doing. We didn’t come to fight. We came to finish what they left broken." By week’s end, France held a contiguous stretch from the Roncesvalles to Lleida hundreds of kilometers of towns, hills, outposts, roads, and airfields. It was not a conquest. It was a presence. Everywhere it stood, the land began changing.

Chapter 259: I buried it under the stairs. Thought it might matter again.

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