Battlefield Priest's Diary

Chapter 142 Joint
Holding a copy of Le Figaro salvaged from the ruins, it read: "The valiant French army successfully repelled the enemy at the Sedan line, destroying 300 enemy tanks in a single day."

After filtering out completely inaccurate information from the newspapers, Qin Hao could confirm that he was on the eve of France's surrender in 1940, or that the German army had already bypassed the Maginot Line.

Tsk~
This time it's going to be a bit tricky.

The diary has a bad habit of frequently leaving things unsaid.

Although this time he wasn't tasked with finding the "Tsar's treasures" as before, the concept of transferring important figures remained very vague.

Who exactly is the key figure? Where did they move to? There's simply no way to confirm these things.

The only clue was the guy lying in front of us.

But he's already dead. You can't expect a dead person to stand up and talk, can you?

Left with no other option, Qin Hao had to collect the items left at the scene to see if there were any clues for his next move.

A smashed and deformed radio, a telegram that was only half translated, a Bible that appeared to be a codebook, and the rest were the everyday items that ordinary priests usually had.

Judging from the tattered telegram, this unfortunate man must have received orders from his superiors to make contact with someone, but before he could fully decipher the telegram, he was killed by a sudden, unexpected cannon shot.

What should we do next?
At this juncture, tens of thousands of citizens, wealthy individuals, and high-ranking officials are about to flee France, making it virtually impossible to find the so-called key figures within this group.

Rather than blindly leaving, it's better to...

Qin Hao then turned his gaze to the priest's robes standing to the side.
-
The British intelligence was very accurate; in just two days, de Gaulle's transfer order arrived, appointing him as the colonel commander of the 4th Armoured Division.

At first, de Gaulle was somewhat surprised, because his position was not suitable for commanding a division-level combat unit.

However, when he actually took office, he found that this "Fourth Armored Division" was just as unworthy of its name as its commander - it was a paper force that had just been cobbled together.

The plan was to deploy 200 tanks, but in reality, only 80 old Renault FT-17s were deployed, and the rest were replaced with armored vehicles.

The armor of this light tank could only withstand shrapnel and some rifle bullets, and its 37mm gun could hardly pose a substantial threat to the armor of the German Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks currently in service.

The only thing they could really show for themselves was four Shire B1 heavy tanks, but two and a half of them were broken.

The infantry were hastily assembled from retreating soldiers who had been withdrawn from the front lines, and their morale was low.

There was a shortage of artillery and shells, and even the number of artillerymen was insufficient, so the infantry had to be temporarily deployed to make up the numbers.

He was about to face the German 19th Panzer Corps, which had just broken through the Sedan defenses and was in high spirits. The commander of this unit was named Heinz Wilhelm Guderian.

With inferior troop strength, equipment, and morale, this was almost a guaranteed defeat.

Although this tall soldier maintained his usual composure in front of his soldiers, on the night he was to go to the front lines, he secretly wrote in his diary, "The firepower of the troops now is probably no match for Guderian's reconnaissance battalion."

Sitting in his command vehicle, de Gaulle was deep in thought. Given the current situation, was he really leading these 6000 men to their deaths on the battlefield?
"Take cover! Take cover now! Enemy planes!"

The colonel's thoughts were interrupted by a soldier's shout.

Buzz! ! ! !

The roar of engines echoed in the sky as a small black dot sped across the heavens.

A Fokker-Wolf reconnaissance plane flew overhead, circled twice to observe the troops on the ground, and then swaggered away.

The French Air Force had been largely destroyed by this point, and there were almost no French planes left in the sky above.

No wonder the German reconnaissance planes were so brazen.

If only we had planes to provide reinforcements, even just simple reconnaissance would be much better than what we are doing now.

But where can we find planes? Right now, only the British have a small number of aircraft operating in the north…

British!!!
Didn't the British just contact me?
"Frank, how much longer until we reach the designated location?" de Gaulle asked his adjutant, who was driving the car.

"Sir, at the current pace, we should be able to finish before sunset."

"When we arrive at the camp, you and I will go out together, just the two of us."

As the moon rose, the silver-gray Citroën drove to the entrance of a deserted village. The villagers had all fled, and there was no sound of people around.

A huge crow perched on a branch, staring at the two people with its blood-red eyes.

"Sir, the road up there is impassable by car; we have to walk." The adjutant took out a flashlight and cocked his sidearm.

He had known his superior for a long time and would never question de Gaulle's orders. The two men, carrying flashlights, carefully made their way uphill, avoiding the loose rocks along the way.

Gua! Gua! Gua!
As the crows cawed and flew into the sky, the two people arrived at the front of a dilapidated church.

Seeing the gloomy scene inside, de Gaulle also drew his sidearm, and the two took turns providing cover as they pushed open the wooden door in front of them.

A sudden change occurred!

Boom! ! !
As the door opened, the ground beneath his feet suddenly became soft, and Captain Frank lost his footing, falling into a cave that appeared out of nowhere.

White smoke rose up, obscuring the view.

De Gaulle raised his hand to take aim, and a dark figure pounced on him.

when! !

The pistol was knocked aside, and a sharp dagger was pressed directly against the colonel's throat.

The somber atmosphere in the room was suffocating for a moment.

The tall colonel tilted his head back and asked in somewhat broken French, "Is this how British agents make contact with knives?"

The man paused for a moment, then slightly withdrew the dagger from the colonel's neck. The man, whose face was obscured, said, "The French never said they would come in with guns."

With the restraints removed, the colonel felt his breathing become smooth again.

The moon turned past the window, a black crow flashed by, and the two people saw each other's faces.

With a typical Asian face but dark skin and a noticeable burn scar on his right cheek, it's hard to believe that someone with such a face could be a top MI6 intelligence agent.

Moreover, the other person's appearance seemed familiar... somewhere before...?

"Charles de Gaulle?! You're the contact?!" The other person's expression was clearly even more surprised.

"You know me?" The colonel didn't think he was that famous.

"No, I just looked at your personal information in the past." The man opposite him quickly regained his composure.

He then dropped a section of rope, pulled up the adjutant who had been buried in the basement, and turned around to take out a notebook.

"Speak, what do you want with me?"

"Wait, are you really a British agent? How can you prove your identity?" De Gaulle looked at the other person with a wary gaze.

The other party was slightly taken aback, then smiled with a hint of amusement. "Proof?! Why should I prove anything? Mr. Charles, I know you even better than you know yourself."

The man raised his hand, and a black raven landed on his shoulder. Then, dragging his black robe, he slowly circled the colonel in the room.

Charles André Joseph Mari de Gaulle was born in Lille, in the Nord department in the north. He attended the Stanislas Secondary School as a child and graduated from the Saint-Cyr Military Academy in 1912…

"He participated in the war against the Germans in 1914 and was a prisoner for a time. Oh, by the way, you had three famous cellmates, one of whom, a guy named Tukhachevsky, did quite well with the Soviets."

"Back in 1920, you won the heart of a young girl. Our first meeting was at an art salon. You claimed it was a chance encounter, but you had actually been waiting there for three days..."

De Gaulle looked as if he had seen a ghost; he now knew what the super agent Mr. Verick had been talking about was like.

If his fellow inmates in prison might be able to find out through intelligence, then the little tricks he used to woo his wife back then were a secret known only to him.

Unbelievable!

This is unbelievable! It's practically mind reading!

What the tall colonel didn't know was that there was such a thing as a memoir, and the guy in front of him had just read it in its entirety.

Having been thoroughly shocked by the "super agent," de Gaulle no longer doubted the other party's identity. He took a deep breath and revealed the purpose of his visit.

"Air support? Which kind?"

Knowing that his request was somewhat excessive, de Gaulle immediately added, "No need to provide fire support, just routine aerial reconnaissance will suffice."

After a few seconds of silence, the other party did not answer, but instead asked a strange question.

"Mr. Charles, how much dried meat do you have in your barracks?"

(End of this chapter)