Name: Guillaume Lucien Béringer
Age/DOB: 11 June 1927 (16)
Gender: Male
Physical Description:Short, but wiry tough, with a sharp nose and a widow's peak in his hair, which is fine, straight and dirty blonde. He tries to stay well-scrubbed and neatly kept as if aware that others are judging him as a social class, and there is a bit of the bantam about him that comes across in the way he keeps his shoulders squared. He seems cold and indifferent much of the time and has that sort of tough demeanor that the fascists just love and a lot of Frenchmen really resent.
Skills:- Wilderness skills, such as knife and rope handling and orientation, via the scouts.
- Mechanically competent; he can generally make basic repairs on things.
- When he joined the scouts, firearms training was left out, mostly at the behest of the Germans. He doesn't know how to shoot.
- Literate, courtesy of the Catholic Church
- Speaks Latin and English, courtesy of the Catholic Church
- Speaks German courtesy of serving the fuckers drinks and the Catholic Church.
History:Guillaume was born to Marie Bertrand and Benjamin Béringer, a local railroad man who was subsequently killed during an accident on the railroads. Marie, in a tight spot, married one David Voclain, who was a factory mechanic for l'Est railroad, whose shop was in
Épernay. Guillaume's family life was best described as a mess -- his mother married his stepfather out of a sense of what a decent family was, as informed by her heartfelt Catholicism. His stepfather was abusive and Guillaume took a lot of beatings growing up. He learned to guard his tongue and hate the man at the same time, and no amount of Church lay education could really scrub him of that attitude.
When France was invaded, David Voclain was killed by the Germans, a resister more along the lines of the type that didn't think it through so much. His own family, without any real means of support, were essentially to become beggars with a home, in difficult circumstances and barely able to support themselves. He still attended school at the behest of his mother, and joined scouting at the behest of his teacher, one Father Jaime O'Dare, an Irish Jesuit that became something of a surrogate father figure.
The French Scouts quickly became a tool of the Vichy French government, a puppet of the Germans, and they were being quickly steered toward obedience to Maréchal Pétain as a father figure of the nation. Guillaume was about to drop out of the scouts, but Father Jaime had a conversation with him. The old Jesuit explained that moral courage and physical courage were related, but not always the same, and that as a member of the Scouts, he could move about more freely and without suspicion. He could give the information to the old Jesuit, who knew how to handle it very discreetly. It was a risky conversation to have with a fifteen year old boy, but Guillaume agreed.
In the beginning, he had to dodge beatings from other boys, who thought he was a complete turncoat, but he also established himself as something of a 'reliable' person to the Milice and local police working for the Germans, while other boys were discouraged. It was grating to be mistrusted and reviled, but he carried on.
Subsequently, he was placed into a different sort of network as the old Jesuit found other duties and out of the necessity of creating cutouts, and as the resistance became more organized. He finds himself in a cell of other teenagers, passing messages and often counting heads, though he dropped out of scouting and Catholic school, using the excuse of needing to support his mother. He works at a cafe as a server, often interacting with the Germans and other collaborationists -- they think he is one of them.
Psychological Profile:Guillaume is outwardly obedient and seemingly a follower type. That much is true in a sense that he considers himself a good soldier and someone that has martyred himself a bit for France. His relationship with father figures is complicated, but he learned how to be a 'good boy' in the way the German and Petainist scum like to see -- an obedient young man that has the sort of grit and hustle that fascists like and think they have. He knows how to talk the talk, mixing that religious sense of order he's been taught with the rhetoric of militarism and anti-communism, which is, after all, the song they like to hear. It's at the point where some of these Vichy types and the occasional German talk about getting him into the Legion Volontaire Francaise when he's old enough, or even into the Waffen-SS. Sometimes, he's not sure where the act ends and the real him begins anymore, as he seems endlessly enmeshed in this double life. For now, the Resistance wants information, and that's what he does. But he knows that De Gaulle and the Allies are coming, and if his lips sing "Die Fahne Hoch" his heart beats "Marseillaise." He is guarded, but that's because he saw the way 'good patriots' with loud mouths that wore their loyalties on their heart got shot down in 1940 and 1941. By 1943, they're a rare breed inside France.
Relatives/Relations/Contacts:- Father Jaime O'Dare is still his confessor. By the same token, they don't talk business anymore. On the other hand, if in real trouble, Guilliame can go there. He is not sure how far up the ladder father Jaime is, and he doesn't want to know.
- Noxious' cafe owner's daughter character.
- His mother, who isn't political and thinks her son is in danger because he's a German sympathizer. She might, in the future, do something drastic.
