Pied Piper

by Nevil Shute

  The old man sank back into his seat, full of doubts and fears.

  He was dozing a little when the train pulled into Joigny soon after one o’clock. It stood there in the station in the hot sunlight, interminably. Presently a man came down the corridor.

  ‘Descendez, monsieur,’ he said. ‘This train goes no farther.’

  Howard stared up at him dumbfounded. ‘But—this is the Paris train?’

  ‘It is necessary to change here. One must descend.’

  ‘When will the next train leave for Paris?’

  ‘I do not know monsieur. That is a military affair.’

  He got the children into their coats, gathered his things together, and presently was on the platform, burdened with his luggage, with the three children trailing after him. He went straight to the station-master’s office. There was an officer there, a capitaine des transports. The old man asked a few straight questions, and got straight answers.

  ‘There will be no more trains for Paris, monsieur. None at all. I cannot tell you why, but no more trains will run north from Joigny.’

  There was a finality in his tone that brooked no argument. The old man said: ‘I am travelling to St. Malo, for England, with these children. How would you advise me to get there?’

  The young officer stared at him. ‘St. Malo? That is not the easiest journey, now, monsieur.’ He thought for a moment. ‘There would be trains from Chartres … And in one hour, at half-past two, there is an autobus for Montargis … You must go by Montargis, monsieur. By the autobus to Montargis, then to Pithiviers, from Pithiviers to Angerville, and from Angerville to Chartres. From Chartres you will be able to go by train to St. Malo.’

  He turned to an angry Frenchwoman behind Howard, and the old man was elbowed out of the way. He retired on to the platform, striving to remember the names of the places that he had just heard. Then he thought of his little Baedeker and got it out, and traced the recommended course across country to Chartres. It skirted round Paris, sixty miles farther west. So long as there were buses one could get to Chartres that way, but Heaven alone knew how long it would take.

  He knew the ropes where French country autobuses were concerned. He went and found the bus out in the station yard, and sat in it with the children. If he had been ten minutes later he would not have found a seat.

  Worried and distracted by the chatter of the children, he tried to plan his course. To go on to Montargis seemed the only thing to do, but was he wise to do it? Would it not be better to try and travel back to Dijon? The route that he had been given through Montargis to Chartres was quite a sensible one according to his Baedeker; it lay along a good main road for the whole of the hundred miles or so to Chartres. This bus would give him a good lift of thirty-five or forty miles upon the way, so that by the time he left it he would be within sixty miles of Chartres and the railway to St. Malo; provided he could get a bus to carry him that sixty miles he would be quite all right. If all went well he would reach Chartres that night, and St. Malo the next morning; then the cross-channel boat and he would be home in England.

  It seemed all right, but was it really wise? He could get back to Dijon, possibly, though even that did not seem very certain. But if he got back there, what then? With the Germans driving forward into France from the north, and the Italians coming up from the south, Dijon seemed to be between two fires. He could not stay indefinitely in Dijon. It was better, surely, to take courage and go forward in the bus, north and by west in the direction of the Channel and home.

  The bus became filled with a hot, sweating crowd of French country people. All were agitated and upset, all bore enormous packages with them, all were heading to the west. Howard took Sheila on his knee to make more room and squeezed Ronnie standing up between his legs. Rose pressed up against him, and an enormous woman with a very small infant in her arms shared the seat with them. From the conversation of the people in the bus Howard learned that the Germans were still pouring on, but that Paris would be defended to the last. Nobody knew how far the Germans had advanced, how near to Joigny they might be. It was wise to move, to go and stay with relations farther to the west.

  One man said: ‘The Chamber has left Paris. It is now at Tours.’ Somebody else said that that rumour was not true, and a desultory argument began. Nobody seemed to take much interest in the Chamber; Paris and the life of cities meant very little to these peasants and near-peasants.

  It was suffocatingly hot in the bus. The two English children stood it better than Howard could have expected; la petite Rose seemed to be more affected than they were. Howard, looking down, saw that she had gone very white. He bent towards her.

  ‘Are you tired?’ he said kindly. She shook her head mutely. He turned and struggled with the window at his side; presently he succeeded in opening it a little and letting in a current of warm, fresh air.

  Presently the driver climbed into his seat, and the grossly overloaded vehicle lumbered from the square.

  The movement brought a little more air into the bus.

  They left the town after a couple of stops, carrying an additional load of people on the roof. They started out along the long straight roads of France, dusty and in poor repair. The dust swirled round the heavy vehicle; it drove in at the open window, powdering them all. Ronnie, standing between the old man’s legs, clung to the window, avid for all that he could see; Howard turned Sheila on his lap with difficulty, so that she could see out too.

  Beside him, presently, Rose made a little wailing cry. Howard looked down, and saw her face white with a light greenish hue; before he could do anything to help her she had vomited upon the floor.

  For a moment he was startled and disgusted. Then patience came back to him; children couldn’t help that sort of thing. She was coughing and weeping; he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped her face and comforted her.

  ‘Pauvre petite chou,’ he said awkwardly. ‘You will be better now. It is the heat.’

  With some struggling he moved Sheila over and lifted Rose up on his knee, so that she could see out and have more air. She was still crying bitterly; he wiped her eyes and talked to her as gently as he could. The broad woman by him smiled serenely, quite unmoved by the disaster.

  ‘It is the rocking,’ she said in soft Midland French, ‘like the sea. Always I have been sick when, as a little girl, I have travelled. Always, always. In the train and in the bus, always, quite the same.’ She bent down. ‘Sois tranquille, ma petite,’ she said. ‘It is nothing, that.’

  Rose glanced up at her, and stopped crying. Howard chose the cleanest corner of his handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Thereafter she sat very quiet and subdued upon his knee, watching the slowly moving scene outside the window.

  ‘I’m never sick in motor-cars,’ said Ronnie proudly in English. The woman looked at them with new curiosity; hitherto they had spoken in French.

  The road was full of traffic, all heading to the west. Old battered motor-cars, lorries, mule carts, donkey-carts, all were loaded to disintegration point with people making for Montargis. These wound in and out among the crowds of people pushing hand-carts, perambulators, wheelbarrows even, all loaded with their goods. It was incredible to Howard; it seemed as though the whole countryside were in flight before the armies. The women working in the fields looked up from time to time in pauses of their work to stare at the strange cavalcade upon the highway. Then they bent again to the harvest of their roots; the work in hand was more important than the strange tides that flowed upon the road.

  Half-way to Montargis the bus heeled slowly to the near side. The driver wrestled with the steering; a clattering bump, rhythmic, came from the near back wheel. The vehicle drew slowly to a stop beside the road.

  The driver got down from his seat to have a look. Then he walked slowly back to the entrance to the bus. ‘Un pneu,’ he said succinctly. ‘Il faut descendre—tout le monde. We must change the wheel.’

  Howard got down with relief. They had been sitting in the bus for nearly two hours,
of which an hour had been upon the road. The children were hot and tired and fretful; a change would obviously be a good thing. He took them one by one behind a little bush in decent manner; a proceeding which did not escape the little crowd of passengers collected by the bus. They nudged each other. ‘C’est un anglais …’

  The driver, helped by a couple of the passengers, wrestled to jack up the bus and get the flat wheel off. Howard watched them working for a little time; then it occurred to him that this was a good opportunity to give the children tea. He fetched his parcel of food from the rack, and took the children a few yards up the road from the crowd. He sat them down upon the grass verge in the shade of a tree, and gave them sandwiches and milk.

  The road stretched out towards the west, dead straight. As far as he could see it was thronged with vehicles, all moving the same way. He felt it really was a most extraordinary sight, a thing that he had never seen before, a population in migration.

  Presently Rose said she heard an aeroplane.

  Instinctively, Howard turned his head. He could hear nothing.

  ‘I hear it,’ Ronnie said. ‘Lots of aeroplanes.’

  Sheila said: ‘I want to hear the aeroplane.’ ‘Silly,’ said Ronnie. ‘There’s lots of them. Can’t you hear?’

  The old man strained his ears, but he could hear nothing. ‘Can you see where they are?’ he asked, nonchalantly. A cold fear lurked in the background of his mind.

  The children scanned the sky. ‘V’là,’ said Rose, pointing suddenly. ‘Trois avions—là.’

  Ronnie twisted round in excitement to Howard. ‘They’re coming down towards us! Do you think we’ll see them close?’

  ‘Where are they?’ he enquired. He strained his eyes in the direction from which they had come. ‘Oh, I see. They won’t come anywhere near here. Look, they’re going down over there.’

  ‘Oh …’ said Ronnie, disappointed. ‘I did want to see them close.’

  They watched the aircraft losing height towards the road, about two miles away. Howard expected to see them land among the fields beside the road, but they did not land. They flattened out and flew along just above the tree-tops, one on each side of the road and one behind flying down the middle. A little crackling rattle sounded from them as they came. The old man stared, incredulous—it could not be …

  Then, in a quick succession, from the rear machine, five bombs fell on the road. Howard saw the bombs actually leave the aeroplane, saw five great spurts of flame upon the road, saw queer, odd fragments hurled into the air.

  From the bus a woman shrieked: ‘Les Allemands!’ and pandemonium broke loose. The driver of the little Peugeot car fifty yards away saw the gesticulations of the crowd, looked back over his shoulder, and drove straight into the back of a mule cart, smashing one of its wheels and cascading the occupants and load on to the road. The French around the bus dashed madly for the door, hoping for shelter in the glass and plywood body, and jammed in a struggling, pitiful mob in the entrance. The machines flew on towards them, their machine-guns spitting flame. The rear machine, its bombs discharged, flew forward and to the right; with a weaving motion the machine upon the right dropped back to the rear centre, ready in its turn to bomb the road.

  There was no time to do anything, to go anywhere, nor was there anywhere to go. Howard caught Sheila and Ronnie and pulled them close to him, flat upon the ground. He shouted to Rose to lie down, quickly.

  Then the machines were on them, low-winged, single engined monoplanes with curious bent wings, dark green in colour. A burst of fire was poured into the bus from the machines to right and left; a stream of tracer-bullets shot forward up the road from the centre aircraft. A few bullets lickered straight over Howard and his children on the grass and spattered in the ground a few yards behind them.

  For a moment Howard saw the gunner in the rear cockpit as he fired at them. He was a young man, not more than twenty, with a keen, tanned face. He wore a yellow students’ corps cap, and he was laughing as he fired.

  Then the two flanking aircraft had passed, and the centre one was very near. Looking up, the old man could see the bombs slung in their racks beneath the wing; he watched in agony for them to fall. They did not fall. The machine passed by them, not a hundred feet away. He watched it as it went, sick with relief. He saw the bombs leave the machine three hundred yards up the road, and watched dumbly as the debris flew upwards. He saw the wheel of a cart go sailing through the air, to land in the field.

  Then that graceful, weaving dance began again, the machine in rear changing places with the one on the left. They vanished in the distance; presently Howard heard the thunder of another load of bombs upon the road.

  He released the children, and sat up upon the grass. Ronnie was flushed and excited. ‘Weren’t they close!’ he said. ‘I did see them well. Did you see them well, Sheila? Did you hear them firing the guns?’

  He was ecstatically pleased. Sheila was quite unaffected. She said: ‘May I have some orange?’

  Howard said slowly and mechanically: ‘No, you’ve had enough to eat. Drink up your milk.’ He turned to Rose and found her inclined to tears. He knelt up and moved over to her. ‘Did anything hit you?’ he asked in French.

  She shook her head dumbly.

  ‘Don’t cry, then,’ he said kindly. ‘Come and drink your milk. It’ll be good for you.’

  She turned her face up to him. ‘Are they coming back? I don’t like the noise they make.’

  He patted her on the shoulder. ‘Never mind,’ he said a little unsteadily. ‘The noise won’t hurt you. I don’t think they’re coming back.’ He filled up the one cup with milk and gave it to her. ‘Have a drink.’

  Ronnie said: ‘I wasn’t frightened, was I?’

  Sheila echoed: ‘I wasn’t frightened, was I?’

  The old man said patiently: ‘Nobody was frightened. Rose doesn’t like that sort of noise, but that’s not being frightened.’ He stared over to the little crowd around the bus. Something had happened there; he must go and see. ‘You can have an orange,’ he said. ‘One-third each. Will you peel it, Rose?’

  ‘Mais oui, monsieur.’

  He left the children happy in the prospect of more food, and went slowly to the bus. There was a violent and distracted clamour from the crowd; most of the women were in tears of fright and rage. But to his astonishment, there were no casualties save one old woman who had lost two fingers of her left hand, severed cleanly near the knuckles by a bullet. Three women, well accustomed to first aid in accidents upon the farm, were tending her, not inexpertly.

  Howard was amazed that no one had been killed. From the right a dozen bullets had entered the body of the bus towards the rear; from the left the front wheels, bonnet and radiator had been badly shot about. Between the two the crowd of peasants milling round the door had escaped injury. Even the crowd in the small Peugeot had escaped, though one of the women in the mule cart was shot through the thigh. The mule itself was dying in the road.

  There was nothing he could do to help the wounded women. His attention was attracted by a gloomy little knot of men around the driver of the bus; they had lifted the bonnet and were staring despondently at the engine. The old man joined them; he knew little of machinery, but it was evident even to him that all was not quite right. A great pool of water lay beneath the engine of the bus; from holes in radiator and cylinder casting the brown, rusty water still ran out.

  One of the men turned aside to spit. ‘Ca ne marche plus,’ he said succinctly.

  It took a moment or two for the full meaning of this to come home to Howard. ‘What does one do?’ he asked the driver. ‘Will there be another bus?’

  ‘Not unless they find a madman for a driver.’ There was a strained silence. Then the driver said: ‘Il faut continuer à pied.’

  It became apparent to Howard that this was nothing but the ugly truth. It was about four in the afternoon and Montargis was twenty-five kilometres, say fifteen miles, farther on, nearer to them than Joigny. They had passed
one or two villages upon the road from Joigny; no doubt one or two more lay ahead before Montargis. But there would be no chance of buses starting at these places, nor was there any reasonable chance of a hotel.

  It was appalling, but it was the only thing. He and the children would have to walk, very likely the whole of the way to Montargis.

  He went into the wrecked body of the bus and collected their things, the two attaché cases, the little suitcase, and the remaining parcels of food. There was too much for him to carry very far unless the children could carry some of it; he knew that that would not be satisfactory for long. Sheila could carry nothing; indeed, she would have to be carried herself a great deal of the way. Ronnie and Rose, if they were to walk fifteen miles, would have to travel light.

  He took his burdens back to the children and laid them down upon the grass. It was impossible to take the suitcase with them; he packed it with the things that they could spare most easily and left it in the bus in the faint hope that one day it might somehow be retrieved. That left the two bulging little cases and the parcels of food. He could carry those himself.

  ‘We’re going to walk on to Montargis,’ he explained to the children. ‘The bus won’t go.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Ronnie.

  ‘There’s something the matter with the engine.’

  ‘Oh—may I go and see?’

  Howard said firmly: ‘Not now. We’re just going to walk on.’ He turned to Rose. ‘You will like walking more than riding in the bus, I know.’

  She said: ‘I did feel so ill.’

  ‘It was very hot. You’re feeling better now?’

  She smiled. ‘Oui, monsieur.’

  They started out to walk in the direction of Montargis. The heat of the day was passing; it was not yet cool, but it was bearable for walking. They went very slowly, limited by the rate at which Sheila walked, which was slow. The old man strolled patiently along. It was no good worrying the children with attempts to hurry them; they had many miles to cover and he must let them go at their own pace.