Hanging on

pudgy hands together. "C'est vrai," he added, seeing Kelly's skepticism. "I would not have called the strike without first finding some way to make up for the lost time. We will be done with your false town ahead of schedule, my friend. All thanks to the miracle of prefabrication."
        "Prefabrication?" Kelly asked. He wrinkled his nose, partly in an expression of bewilderment and partly because Maurice Jobert was sweaty and smelly. "I don't understand."
        "You will!" Maurice said. He went to the entranceway, and lifted a canvas flap. "Be at the bridge in one hour, and you will understand perfectly." He chuckled madly and winked at the major.
        At 1:20 that afternoon, Maurice returned from Eisenhower with the first truckload of pieced-up barn walls. They were standing on edge in the back of a board-sided German cargo truck, each panel twelve feet high and twenty feet long-which was precisely the size of a wall of one of the single-story platform houses that comprised a sizable portion of the fake village.
        The striking workers had not slept away the morning, after all. Instead, they had scouted barns, sheds, stables, and outbuildings which were firmly constructed, dismantling some of these and cutting them into maneuverable sections. They had taken only tightly joined panels that could pass as the walls of houses and churches. A passable exterior was all that mattered, for the insides of the fake houses would not be plastered or finished in any way. And after cutting up a barn, they had enough walls for seven or eight single-story platform buildings. A stable might build half a convent. A milk house could be sawed up and put back together as a two-story nuns' residence.
        "It will save an incredible amount of time," Maurice told Kelly as the major inspected the walls stacked in the back of the truck. "One of the most time-consuming jobs is putting the siding on the buildings. Now, we can nail it up in huge pieces."
        Kelly was not so sure. "No matter how well built a barn is, the wall is only a single thickness of wood. Some of the boards are not going to meet perfectly. Light will escape through them. Anyone looking at a fake house, made from these panels, will see light showing through the slats and know that it's a phony."
        "Then no one must light a lantern inside any house but the rectory-and the church," Maurice said. "Your men must pass the night in darkness."
        "They haven't much choice," Kelly said.
        Though the individual partitions were heavy, there was plenty of sweaty, dirty, grunting, fear-driven manpower to cope with them. Twenty men wrestled each monstrous twelve-by-twenty wall from the bed of the German truck, and balanced it between them with considerable shouting and staggering back and forth.
        "For God's sake don't drop it!" Private Fark screamed, as he took the front position on one of the walls. "It'll kill us if we lose control!"
        With sunbrowned muscles bulging and sweat running in salty streams, with grunting and cursing that would have embarrassed many of the hard-working Frenchwomen if they had understood it, the walls were moved from the truck and toted to various platform houses which were now framed but not yet sided. The walls were balanced precariously against the frames of the platform houses, again by sheer muscle power, and the carpenters went to work nailing the panels to the beams which had been waiting since yesterday. Twenty long nails across the top, one every foot, then the same ratio down both sides, hammers smacking loudly, a chorus of blows echoing across the camp. When the straining, sweat-slimed men let go of the wall, the carpenters scurried along the base, praying that the thing would not rip loose and collapse on them, and they nailed that edge down as well. Then, while Maurice went for another load and while the majority of the husky laborers went to other tasks-of which there were many-the carpenters resecured the walls, pounding in again as many nails, one exactly between each pair they had already placed. At the corners of the building, where the prefabricated panels often did not meet in perfect eye-pleasing harmony-and where, in fact, there was sometimes as much as a two-inch gap despite the cut-to-order nature of the materials-the carpenters nailed up vertical finishing boards from foundation to eaves; these ran perpendicular to the horizontally slatted ex-barn-walls and provided the