10.
Love and Chlorophyll.Clément Vallette, our radio operator whom everybody except me calls ‘Prof.’ has shed the trappings of university life and of life in Strasbourg before ‘42. He wears a thick, bottle-green pullover frayed at the elbows, washes and darns his own socks with enormous concentration (“Don’t talk to the great man while he’s thinking”, says Gérard to the boys jokingly). He shaves only when his nascent beard makes him feel uncomfortable, addresses everybody by his first name or nom-de guerre, takes orders from the colonel unflinchingly, eats out of his mess-tin with his personal wooden spoon (some of us use forks and knives as well), and leaves the bothy almost every day at dawn carrying his radio equipment, playing a cat and mouse game with the enemy patrols and detectors,
