Étienne LeBlanc’s resistance mission turns his technical knowledge into an urgent, dangerous act of service during the siege of Saint-Malo. Asked to locate German air-defense guns and transmit their coordinates, he manages to report one position and goes out to survey two more. Before he can complete the work, the occupation authorities detain him with other men and send him to Fort National. There, his pleas to reach his blind niece and great-niece meet the helplessness of a city under bombardment.

The assignment and its stakes

The mission begins as Allied bombs demolish the rail station and German forces disable the harbor installations. News reaching Étienne suggests that liberation may be close: wounded German troops are arriving in Saint-Servan, and Americans have captured Mont Saint-Michel, about twenty-five miles away. At the bakery, Madame Ruelle tells him that the resistance needs the locations of anti-aircraft batteries, together with precise coordinates that can be broadcast. Her request makes the task concrete: information about the guns could help save lives, but finding them requires someone to move through the city and expose himself to danger.

Madame Ruelle explains the work in terms that match Étienne’s particular abilities. He must find the guns, plot their positions, and transmit the resulting coordinates. He understands what that requires: walking around with a compass and notepad, with no safer way to gather the measurements. He warns that the Germans may shoot him. The assignment is therefore not a remote calculation; its accuracy depends on his presence in places where he can be seen and caught.

The danger is sharpened by the prospect of a mass arrest. Madame Ruelle has heard that men between eighteen and sixty may be interned the following day, with papers checked and anyone suspected of resistance imprisoned at Fort National. Later, the announced roundup is described as applying to every man between sixteen and sixty. The difference between those stated age ranges remains in the account, but both warnings make the immediate risk plain: Étienne must complete the work while the authorities are tightening their control over the city’s men.

Surveying the batteries

Étienne approaches the assignment with a resolve that surprises him. As he steps outside, he feels strong and is glad that Madame Ruelle has given him this final task. He has already transmitted the location of one air-defense battery: a cannon on a shelf of the ramparts beside the Hotel of Bees. Two more positions remain. For his calculations, he chooses the cathedral spire and the outer island of Le Petit Bé as known points from which to determine a third, unknown point. The simple geometry gives his mind a defined problem to hold onto amid the crisis.

The plan depends on taking bearings in person. Étienne needs to move around with a compass and notepad, identify the two remaining positions, and calculate where the guns are. He is nearing the dark ramparts when a uniformed man limps toward him out of the darkness. The account does not specify exactly how that encounter leads to his detention, or whether he finishes the survey. What it makes clear is that the mission is interrupted: one battery’s location has been sent, while the two further bearings are still outstanding when danger closes in.

Detention and the plea to return

The roundup sweeps Étienne into the authorities’ detention of the city’s men. They are told to assemble at the tower of the château and then to be marched to Fort National at low tide. At the fort, Étienne begs his jailers, its guardian, and fellow prisoners to let him go. His appeal is specific: his niece, his great-niece, is blind and alone. He says he is sixty-three, rather than sixty, and protests that his papers were unfairly taken and that he is not a terrorist.

His words do not change his situation. Étienne tries a few German phrases to persuade the Feldwebel in charge to help him, but the officer shrugs and looks back toward the burning city across the water. The gesture marks the distance between the personal urgency of Étienne’s plea and the larger machinery of occupation and war: he is asking to resume responsibility for his family, while those holding him act as if nothing can be done.

A stray American shell strikes the fort. The wounded cry out below in the munitions cellar, and the dead are buried under rocks above the tide line. After this, Étienne stops talking. The scene does not show his release or a return to his niece; instead, his appeal ends in silence as the siege reaches the prison itself.

Resistance under occupation

The episode places Étienne’s mission within a broader system of restrictions and resistance. Earlier, Marie-Laure had to press her father to read aloud an order requiring residents to surrender their radio receivers at 27 rue de Chartres by noon the next day, under threat of arrest as saboteurs. In the besieged city, radio remains both an object of official control and a means of transmitting information the resistance needs. Étienne’s task—to send gun coordinates—uses communication not as private listening, but as a way to make local knowledge operational.

The mission also shows the costs of turning ordinary skills into resistance work. Étienne’s knowledge of maps, bearings, and calculation gives the network something useful; it also requires him to expose himself to surveillance and detention. His one successful transmission is a tangible result, while the unfinished survey and his imprisonment show the limits imposed by the occupation. The episode’s decisive movement is from purposeful action to enforced confinement: Étienne leaves the bakery feeling strong, fixes his attention on a triangle of known points, and ends at Fort National, unable to reach the family member whose safety gives his plea its urgency.