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Unorthodox Conspirator. Millar, the unorthodox conspirator, also refused to be burdened down with weapons and routine equipment. "No weapons," he said to an officer who offered him a carbine. "Please don't thrust weapons or equipment upon me. If go I must then I will attempt to conquer more by charm and example. . . . Gandhi is the greatest general today. He may carry off a permanent victory. He fights without arms, he fights with the will and the suffering smile. Christ taught the genius of counterattacking by turning the other cheek. Christianity persists today. We shall win this war against Germany. But how long will our victory of arms persist? Perhaps twenty years. That is why it is important, even though we are committed to a war of arms, to fight according to the rules of civilized battle, to show the Boche that there exists among his enemies, even while they fight, a flowering of these softer and more charming qualities which he secretly so greatly admires."
Said a Frenchman: "If I thought you were going to talk like that in France, Captain Millar, I would kill you now before you could leave."
Said an Englishwoman: "Now, now. You know that Captain Millar is quite mad. . . ."
Forty-five Seconds. Millar made the trip to France in a big U.S. Liberator. Below he saw faint lights—four of them in the required shape, with one flashing an erratic "K," the code letter. Twelve parachuted containers filled with weapons aric other useful material were already floating down through the moonlit sky. Captain Millar jumped: "Next moment I was lying on my back in the air watching the fat round camouflaged belly of the aircraft passing above me. My parachute opened." He knew that he had 45 seconds to descend in: "Forty-five seconds between free America and France in chains."
In the moonlight, "three figures, in line appeared ahead of me, like figures in a wheatfield in a Russian film. . . . They came on without caution, shouting to each other." Millar called: "Good morning." Instead of replying, the three Frenchmen threw themselves flat in the wheat. At last one of them asked: "Who are you?" Said Millar: "Who are you?" Then one of them had an idea: "Perhaps he's a parachutist. I thought the last tube was a man. Not a tube." "Perhaps," one of them shouted in the quiet night, "you are a British officer?" At last Captain Millar satisfied the Frenchmen of his identity. At that moment he did not know that these three unconspiratorial conspirators were, a few months before Dday, a substantial detachment of the Resistance in his area of the Franche Comté. The Maquis, resoundingly called the Equipes Boulaya, consisted of two groups of four and twelve men respectively, living in hog-like filth in the woods.