First Harvest

PRIVATE HUBER, the Bavarian peasant, deserted from his unit in the occupied village of Trefleur on the English Channel. Lieutenant Klemm was sure Huber had simply wandered off, and the French knew he had deserted. But Jensen, the Nazi noncom, proclaimed, “A German soldier never deserts, and Klemm had to pretend to agree with him. Then when Huber’s body turned up on the beach where he had obviously fallen to his death in the dark, the Nazis in command of the region saw a chance to make an example of the villagers. In the season of harvest, the harvest of blood begins.

The Germans in the story represent various types, but the French are more carefully individualized. The Mayor, the Schoolmistress, the Postman, the Priest are real people. That they are also people of spirit develops in the course of this swift, inexorable sequence of murderous eveuts.