Charlie's War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘Rey. Mayor,’ he said. ‘I was two years the Mayor when the Boche came. Then there was a German administrator. I still have two years left to do. I start them now. Are you a socialist?’

  ‘Not this week. How about you?’

  He laughed at the challenge.

  ‘This week I am a Gaullista.’

  ‘Is that a good choice?’

  ‘This week it is. You are the Englishman who speaks good French. Clément thinks that you are a spy. It is Clément who you came in with.’

  ‘We weren’t introduced. I am not a spy. How did you know what he thinks?’

  ‘His daughter told us.’

  ‘I saw no daughter.’

  ‘She stayed behind in the barn, and then ran up here the quick way. We have been waiting for you for fifteen minutes.’

  ‘The old man slowed me down.’

  ‘I doubt it. He can walk all day without breaking a sweat – you say that in English?’

  ‘Yes, M’sieur. We do.’

  ‘I think that you are out of condition, Englishman: like a man newly out of hospital.’

  Then he laughed a big pealing laugh that filled the small porch. The bowls players joined in. The boy and old man joined in. Bastards. When His Worship had had enough of the joke he wiped his brow again, and said, ‘What do you want? Food?’

  ‘Yes. For three. I have companions.’ No harm telling them what they knew.

  ‘I know. I have two men watching over them. They will be safe. Are you in charge?’

  ‘No. One of them is a Major.’

  ‘No matter. It is the rule of some people’s lives: no matter how high in the ranks you rise, you still end up making the coffee, and fetching the supper. Maybe you are one of those.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘No matter. I am one. Look; I am their Mayor, and yet the lazy swine expect me to deal with you myself. Maybe you be Mayor one day.’

  ‘I would be honoured.’ He smiled when I said that. A little inward smile. It was the first really clever thing I’d said all day. He called over a man he called Gaston, took his wine from him and pressed it on me, saying, ‘You stay here, and toast the République. Stay here. I will bring food for your journey. You will be safe if you stay here. You have money, of course? ‘Then he asked me, ‘Why are you smiling, my friend?’

  ‘There is no right answer to your question, for me. If I say yes you might steal my money; if I say no, you might say, no sale.’

  ‘I think you can pay,’ he told me. ‘Clément’s daughter told me so. I will get you what we have most of: bread, wine and cheese. OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘No eggs, no meat – unless you eat rabbit.’

  ‘Fine.’

  He threw me an insulting mock salute as he strolled away. And winked his left eye. Its purpose was either to keep face in front of his subjects, or to warn me not to panic. I began to panic. There was a notice in Ancien French on a brass plate on the door which led into the chapel. I could just make it out. It told how a local laird, the Duc du something or other, a Templar Knight, was discomfited at this very spot (probably by distant relatives of the people I could see around me) in defence of his religion and the chapel. Only our Gallic neighbours would use a word like discomfited, when they meant that the poor bastard had been chopped to pieces with sharp agricultural instruments. Maybe the panic I began to feel was a residual of what he had left behind him in his last moments, sunk into the stone, like his blood. That had happened in 1307. It can’t have been a very good year to be a Templar.

  A pretty, dark-haired girl turned up hauling three bottles of wine and a big stone jar of what turned out to be water. Then she went back and returned with flat loaves of bread and a round cheese. I could have fancied her if I hadn’t been so nervy. That, plus the Luger pistol she wore in a holster on a stout leather belt cinched in around her waist like a corset was a discouragement to the amorous. The Mayor didn’t return with her; he went back to his game of bowls. Sir Francis fucking Drake. I asked Clément, ‘Is that his daughter?’

  Clément gave me his gaps, and laughed.

  ‘She’s my daughter. Clémentine. He wants her, but all he can do is look. His wife would geld him.’

  ‘Who do I pay?’

  ‘Me. I found you.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifty invasion francs or fifteen dollars American.’

  ‘That is a lot, M’sieur Clément.’

  He shrugged. They call it the Gallic shrug. It’s what the French do when they’ve fucked you over, and want to lay the blame on God. He said, ‘You’re still alive.’

  I paid him. I got it at last. These folk were old-fashioned bandits, lurking beneath their castle walls to waylay careless strangers like me. He escorted me away from the cathedral with its grotesques, and back down the way I had come. Giving him sly sideways glances, I was sure that they had been carved from life. The boy with the Sten had disappeared, but the girl with the Luger walked at my other side. As we neared the gate through the walls Clément spat in the road, and laid a hand on my arm to slow me. He was carrying the wine, me the food, and the girl the water jar. He said, ‘I think that you’re going to make me an offer, either for the girl, or for the Boche gun she’s wearing.’

  ‘Which would be best?’

  ‘An offer for the gun would not offend.’

  ‘Ten dollars?’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘The food cost more than that.’

  ‘Food and drink are short. We have hundreds of Boche pistols. Officers can’t fight. They threw them away as they ran. Give him the gun, girl.’

  She unbuckled the belt, and passed it over as if she was granting me a bodily favour. Who knows? Perhaps she was. She thrust her hand into a pocket in her skirt and came up with a fistful of 9 mm bullets for it. I buttoned them into my Chaplain’s battledress blouse pocket. I couldn’t help watching the way her breasts moved under her shirt. Her father couldn’t help watching me watching.

  It took another half-hour to drag the vittles back to Kate on my own. Clément’s duties had ceased once he saw me from the premises. England was standing alongside the car sharing a cigarette with a mad-looking youth with a Schmeisser machine pistol. It didn’t look as if his rudimentary French had dented their relationship. Raffles was still asleep at the wheel; or looked that way.

  ‘There you are!’ the Major said to me. ‘I think that this johnnie wants some money not to kill me.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Five dollar,’ said the man. His gaps matched Clément’s and the kid’s. I was glad the girl hadn’t opened her mouth as she smiled. I told him, ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Clément Three – that’s how I labelled him – helped us to unbury the car. I got Les to move over, dumping the goodies in the back with the Major. I put five miles between us and the small walled citadel before stopping to eat. That was in a small unwalled town with a flat, open square and no bomb sites that I could see. I parked the car in the shadow on the up-sun side of the square. The people smiled and passed by. We woke Les up, and ate a long lunch in the sunshine. He admired my new gun, and showed me how to strip it, and clear a jam. He told me he wouldn’t swap his Sten for it: I hadn’t asked.

  With my mouth full of greasy bread and cheap cheese I told them, ‘I’m sure the bastards knew who I was. Somebody’s been spreading it around. They dropped hints, but didn’t come right out with it.’

  ‘A wanted man,’ the Major said. ‘How damned colourful.’ Then he said, ‘You can’t say I didn’t warn you. They were probably pals of Maggs.’

  It was late afternoon. Les told us, ‘I need another forty winks. Come back for me in an hour or so, and we’ll move on. I want to be in Blijenhoek the day after tomorrow.’ I didn’t know where Blijenhoek was, but what the hell? Grace was up there with the tanks somewhere . . . or had she already been passed on to somebody else?

  England and I sat away from the afternoon sun at the back of a darkened bar, the way Les had taught us
. We kept the car in view all the time, although I doubt that we could have reached it in time if some bastard had decided to have a go at Les. A flight of four P-38 Lightnings passed low over the square, with one flash git waggling his wings at the local popsies. The aircraft were all painted drab green, and had black and white invasion stripes around their wings: the wriggler had a big, smiley, orange and yellow sun on the aircraft’s nose. Their twin supercharged engines whistled as they beat us up. England said, ‘Saying hello to his girlfriend. They must be based close to here.’ Deductive logic.

  The wine was thin and watered, and dearer than better stuff in Paris. The waitress who flashed her chests at us probably was as well: Paris seemed a thousand years and a million miles away. I wondered where Lee Miller was – up ahead of us probably – and if the artist had come back yet.

  ‘I didn’t like the way I got into this,’ I told England. ‘When I joined up they told us how the service was supposed to work. That was training stations, until you were ready to go to war, then crewing up at an O.U.T.’

  ‘Don’t you mean an O.T.U?’

  ‘Perhaps I did. This wine is getting better . . . after that you had the squadron and thirty trips to Germany, and if you survived that, a posting to a cushy number for six months, before coming back on ops.’

  ‘Didn’t it work out like that?’

  ‘Only until I finished my trips; then it went wrong. After my posting to Tempsford, and the crash, everything got very unofficial. Goldie, that was my last proper CO, told me I’d been lent to Cliff, and Cliff lent me to the Bakers – that’s Grace’s parents. They sent me looking for Grace. First with Cliff’s help, then yours.’

  ‘What’s so worrying about that?’

  ‘No papers. No orders. Nothing. If I’m picked up by the MPs, and Cliff denies all knowledge of me – which he could just do, on his current showing – what have I got to prove that I’m not just AWOL?’

  ‘Nothing. But their need for a commonsense explanation will direct them. Very straightforward folk, the rozzers: even Army ones like ours.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Most deserters travel away from the Front: not towards it, like you. You’re bound to find some Redcap bright enough to at least listen to your story.’

  ‘Then there’s another thing. That charge sheet the Yanks said they got from my people.’

  ‘I told you: they probably embroidered it to give you the shits. I should imagine your CO just issued something innocuous to cover his own back, and Cliff probably monitors signal traffic about you as a good way of keeping tabs. Maybe he even provided some of the lurid embellishments. If so, he fucked up: he gilded the lily and our American cousins thought they’d do us a favour by picking you up . . . especially if they put the word out on you, and Maggs picked up on it. That’s why Cliff came out to get you back.’

  ‘What about the theft of a Stirling bomber then?’

  ‘I thought that that was a good touch, too. How much is a Stirling worth?’

  ‘Thousands and thousands.’ The thought depressed me.

  ‘If they ask you to pay that back out of your pay you’ll be fucked.’

  ‘I get the feeling I already am.’

  He leaned over and tapped me on the arm. He said, ‘Ask her what her name is . . .’ He meant the waitress.

  The girl told me, ’ortense. No H, the way she said it. I told him, and he asked me, ‘Look old boy, if you’re not going to roger her . . . and she’s begging for it worse than Fay Wray does . . . would you mind awfully if I did?’

  I left him to her, or her to him, whichever way you care to see it, and strolled back across the square to Kate. Seeing her in the subdued light of lengthening shadows I realized that I was fonder of her than any man had the right to be of just a simple car. Maybe she wasn’t so simple after all. Anyway, I hadn’t better tell Les about it.

  Just as I was about to climb in the front passenger seat alongside him, and kip until he woke up, the flight of Lightnings crossed the air above me again, on their way back. The racks on their wings, which had contained armour-piercing rockets for the low-level stuff, were empty now . . . And there were only three of them: not the four seen an hour earlier. The one that was missing was the one which had the big, friendly sun painted on its nose. Inside me I gave that Gallic shrug: maybe the flash git was walking home. You never know. I woke up when I felt the car shift under me as the Major settled in the back seat. He pulled the door shut. Les yawned and stretched, nearly braining me. James told me, ‘I told you so.’

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘That girl. Her boyfriend is one of those fighter pilots who flew over the square this afternoon. She says he always shakes his wings at her.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Excessively agricultural.’ He coughed one of those weak apologetic coughs. ‘But any port in a storm, and all that.’

  *

  Some distance out of town, with the light all lost, Les stopped us on one of those straight, tree-lined Roman roads that crisscross northern and central France. England radioed a check into his HQ, wherever that was, and Les filled our tanks from a jerrycan. When we got going again James soon fell asleep, whilst I performed the little navigation feats that were required under the light of one of those right-angled WD-issue torches. The miles sang under Kate’s wheels. Les whistled ‘Lili Marleen’. Life was OK, but I remembered an evening I had once spent in a field with Grace, when I had never been happier.

  PART THREE

  Belgium: March 1945

  Eleven

  Les stopped the car once at about 0430. I awoke with a start. Someone was talking to Les from outside the car. A torch flashed briefly in my eyes, and on England’s sleeping face. When I focused on the stranger’s voice I found that it was reassuringly English – a Brummie, I think – and we were at some kind of checkpoint which was lit by subdued half-lights. I heard a match striking, and smelled tobacco smoke. Les said something I didn’t catch. I was too busy trying to get my body to move from the curled-up position it seemed to have set in. The stranger laughed, and his torchlight flicked briefly on my face again. The white and black pole in the narrow gleam of our shrouded headlights lifted, and Les got us rolling, winding up his door’s window as he did so. It was chill; I could feel it getting into the car.

  He doffed his beret, with one hand still on the wheel, and handed it to me, saying, ‘Dig us out a couple of fags.’

  So I did, selecting a couple of roll-ups from his store. He put the beret back on one-handed. I lit the fags with my American lighter, and we smoked companionably in the darkness. I asked him, ‘What did you tell that frontier guard about me?’

  ‘That you were a Chaplain on his way forward. I think there’s a lot of burying to be done.’

  The sky was lightening a little a long way to the east. I said, ‘I didn’t realize that dawn would be as early as this.’

  Les gave a grunt. It might have been a laugh, or it might not.

  ‘It isn’t. That’s Monty’s moonlight. You never heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They do it on nights of low cloud. They shine hundreds of searchlights forward and upwards, until the light is reflected back down by the clouds. It means there’s enough light for the poor bastards to fight under.’

  ‘Monty’s moonlight?’ I said, not quite believing him. ‘That’s right. You still never heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  I rolled the window down an inch, and ditched my dogend. I hunched down in the seat again, and dozed.

  Les woke me at about six. The roads were wet but I had missed the rain.

  ‘I want to get off the road and laager up – preferably with someone nasty near by to look after us if Jerry decides to come back. A nice snappy light tank squadron would do. Look for hedges that have been arseholed by something big and recent. You can follow tanks across the country by the flat stuff they leave behind them.’

  ‘Flat stuff?’

  ‘Like I said: ’edges
, flat houses and flat people . . . flat everything.’

  ‘There!’ shouted England, who was fully awake. He was pointing to a signpost leaning crazily to one side at a point just in front of us, where the road was crossed by a country lane.

  ‘Tank spoor!’ the Major yelled. ‘Knew it! Tally ho!’

  We turned left onto a lane which wasn’t much more than a track, and followed what they assured me was a tank trail of broken tree branches and scarred verges.

  I asked them, ‘What if they were Jerries heading the other way?’

  James gave me the withering idiot stare before he answered, ‘Well: the signpost would have been knocked in the other direction, wouldn’t it?’

  They were usually right. We turned right, off the road, when we found a hedge with several large holes smashed in it.

  ‘Told yer,’ says Les. ‘If they’d been coming towards us there’d be shite and mud all over the road. There ain’t.’ After two more fields we found them, grazing like cows, and steaming in the weak sun. Most of them had parked up around the edges of a humped meadow. A couple of them had their engines running and were crowned by tell-tale plumes of thin blue exhaust smoke. Les gunned us up alongside one which had two limp pennons on a radio mast. Kate’s engine block ticked as it cooled and contracted. A brown job Captain about twelve years old was lounging against the tank. He straightened up, but not by much, when James England unfolded himself from our Humber. He touched his black beret with a leather-covered swagger stick, and said, ‘Major,’ and England said, ‘Captain.’