"Ein bisschen Frieden."

 

Nicole Hochloch went, with a thousand precautions, to fetch water from the spring. Well, "the spring" was a big word. A fresh stream of water was coming from a mossy wall. Nicole had to stick her mouth against the mossy stone to quench her thirst. She avoided making any noise. She didn't want to be spotted, even though not many people passed by on the road leading to Tulle. She had moved into this small ruined house, in the Chameyrat bend, in the hills above Tulle. The house was almost empty, but there were beds, one of which was almost clean, and some canned goods. The place must have been used as a dormitory for the workers of the nearby warehouse.

The roof was in bad shape and cobwebs threatened on all the walls. But Nicole was grateful to have found the relative safety of this shelter after what she had been through. The heavy front door closed and there were even wooden panels over the windows and doors to guard against intruders. The place must not have been lived in for decades. Everyone had forgotten about it. The driveway in front of the house was overgrown with vegetation and the walls and roof were covered with a thick blanket. From the road, one could not guess that there was a low house behind this green jungle, especially since several trees had grown through the roof. This was probably the reason why the house still had shutters, while all the houses around had been looted, boned by the waves of refugees that passed over the road like a cloud of locusts. People were stealing whatever they could. They were burning wooden shutters and furniture to make campfires. 

These hundreds of thousands of people had been thrown onto the roads of the country, fleeing the invasions and the anarchy of the civil war. In the north, the Russian army had attacked by surprise. It had invaded the country by entering through Switzerland. The Russians bombarded the cities and finished massacring the last elements of the French army that had not perished in Eastern Europe or Germany. Prague had been destroyed, as had most of the cities that were in the path of the Russians. The Saarland, the region of Germany where Nicole was from, had suffered particularly badly. Nicole had not heard from anyone.

In the South, a Muslim army had landed at La Seyne-sur-Mer. Made up of international jihadists, swollen by local delinquent hordes, this Islamic cloud was looting and raping everything in its path. This murderous madness was fed by decades of frustration of a Muslim world humiliated by the West. The smallest villages were sacked. Men were massacred, mutilated, women were systematically dishonored. Some of them survived as sex slaves. 

Nicole was in a campsite with her husband, in Ceyreste, north of Cassis, when the troubles started. Her husband had been killed right from the start, his throat slit in the square of the vacation camp. Nicole, mad with terror, had fled, running through the hills. Everywhere, it was horror. The smallest villages were on fire and blood. Nicole, in shock, had hardly eaten anything for days. She did not speak French well. She didn't understand everything people were saying. 

She had finally reached areas, west of Montélimar, that were not yet invaded. There she joined a column of poor people fleeing on the roads, heading west. She had understood that they wanted to reach the west, Brittany. They said that there, in Brittany, they would be safe. Some spoke of the prophecies of La Fraudais. 

On the road, several bands had attacked the unfortunate people again. People were stripped of their last possessions, women were taken away. It was during one of these attacks, near Tulle, that she had thrown herself without hesitation into a wall of brambles to escape the worst. She had remained there, motionless, for hours. 

When the noises had stopped, she had looked around. She had seen a wall! She had crawled, at the cost of a thousand cuts, until she reached that wall. By groping, she had found a window, then the door. This one was open. Inside the house, she found a few cans of food. 

After a few days of rest, with the help of the cans, she had the strength to move. She had been able to locate the "spring" and some fruits and vegetables, half eaten by animals, that remained from an old abandoned vegetable garden at the bottom of the lot.

The column of refugees had dried up. There were no more survivors able to come this far. Nicole had had a few days to think. She could hear the sound of explosions, towards the East. She had lost her husband, had no news of her children. It seemed that her country, Germany, was destroyed. 

She thought of the good years, of the prosperity of her country, of her carefree youth, of the Eurovision contest she had won. She saw the faces of her audience, the smile of her husband, their beautiful house where they received their friends. All that was gone, all that world was gone in a few hours. 

She didn't know if she would survive this. More exactly, she didn't know if she wanted to survive all this. She preferred to leave thinking about the good old days. The chaos that the world was experiencing, she didn't want to experience. She settled comfortably on her bed and closed her eyes, humming "Ein bisschen Frieden..."