One Man's Flag

by David Downing

  “So how did you find Jed?” Margaret asked a trifle bluntly.

  Caitlin decided to be honest. “It was only a year since I’d seen him, but he seemed a lot older. Not physically—he looks exactly the same—but in the way he talks, the way he is. He’s grown up. He’s not happy, of course—who could be in such circumstances?—but he seemed—how can I put it?—he seemed at ease with himself. The things he worries about—like getting killed or losing friends or being hardened by all the things he’s witnessed—they’re the things any sane young man would worry about.”

  His mother absorbed all this in silence, sadly shook her head, and finally managed a smile. “And how about Jack?” she asked. “Where is he now?”

  “I’ve no idea. He’s off on a job, but he didn’t know where it would take him. I don’t think he could have told me if he did know.”

  “He went to war, too, you know. He was even younger than Jed. And it changed him, too, but not for the worse, I think. So there’s hope for Jed. I just pray they both survive it.”

  “And I.”

  Margaret insisted that Caitlin stay for lunch, a thick and delicious vegetable soup. There was no shortage of conversation between the two of them, but Jack’s father was mostly silent, confining himself to polite, almost obsequious requests for one thing or another. The man Jack had described on the Manchuria was conspicuous by his absence.

  Caitlin’s journey south the following day was both long and uncomfortable. After weeks in Dublin and days in Glasgow, a cold, damp London felt profoundly anticlimactic, and the news that the American socialist and songwriter Joe Hill had finally been executed in Utah depressed her deeply. She had met him in prewar days, and on one memorable night in Brooklyn he had dedicated his song “The Rebel Girl” to her.

  Staring out her lodgings window at a foggy Clapham Common, she was reminded of the previous winter, when her life had still revolved around a brother awaiting a similar fate to Joe Hill’s.

  Over the next few days, she cajoled herself back into work, seeking out stories that offered a blissfully ignorant American public glimpses of what the war was doing to Europe, away from the obvious battlefields. And work was fine—it was the rest of her life that left her feeling increasingly lonely. Sylvia was her best friend in London, but she didn’t feel she could talk to Sylvia about Jack. Her friend was still mourning Keir Hardie, and it felt almost cruel to have a man who might very well come back.

  McColl spent five days above the café, five that felt like fifty. The broken leg made it hard to sleep, and the doctor freely admitted a reluctance to use up all his painkillers on one patient. So the days dragged by, and the icy nights seemed even slower.

  He had a great deal of time for reflection. Those who thought that only the threat of death could parade one’s life before one’s eyes had never spent a week confined in a freezing Belgian attic.

  He thought about Caitlin a lot, mostly with thanks in his heart, though sometimes in the predawn hours he found it hard to resist the conclusion that they would never be together in the normal way. The idea of having children with her seemed as unrealistic as it was enticing.

  Once the doctor had been back to put his leg in splints, Mathilde was the only person he saw. She brought him food and drink three times a day and emptied the ancient commode he managed to reach with the aid of a crutch. It wasn’t until the fourth evening that she stayed long enough to offer a rundown of the local situation.

  There was a small German garrison in Huy, most of them middle-aged Landsturm, and a rest camp for soldiers some ten miles up the river, about halfway to Namur. Neither posed much of a threat to those Belgians actively resisting the occupation, either on their own government’s behalf or in collaboration with the Allied intelligence services. The real danger came from two German police forces, the military and the secret. Each area of occupied Belgium had a branch of the former, which reported to army headquarters. The latter had their own HQ in Brussels, attached to the staff of the German governor-general. The two organizations often worked together, but relations between them were rumored to be poor.

  They had three main methods when it came to uncovering resisters and spies. The first was the sudden raid, in which whole streets or districts of towns were blocked off and every dwelling within the cordon searched. The second was a rigorous restriction of movement. People were not allowed more than ten kilometers from their homes without copious proofs of purpose and identity, and even the shortest journey required some sort of pass. Third, and most potent of all, was the German use of paid informers, which according to Mathilde accounted for nine in ten arrests. In Huy several active collaborators had been identified and dealt with, but no one expected the supply of traitors to suddenly dry up.

  What the informers and their German paymasters sought were the train watchers. They had caught quite a few and intercepted their reports—they knew what sort of information was reaching the Allies and how crucial it was that the flow be stopped. By keeping tabs on German train movements, Belgian watchers made it impossible for the German army to mount a surprise offensive.

  And McColl would be one of them, Mathilde announced on the following evening. “Tomorrow night we will move you to a house on the other side of town,” she told him, “one with a fine view of the railway line. It’s a special house, as you will see. And there you can start to earn your keep,” she added with a smile. “It will be much less boring than lying here and staring at the ceiling.”

  His training would begin as soon as he reached the new address.

  They moved him the following evening, carrying him down and out through the back door to where a horse and cart were waiting. Buried under a load of furniture and with every rut in the road shooting pains through his leg, he spent the twenty-minute ride praying that each halt was the last. When they finally arrived at his new home, he had a fleeting glimpse of a tall, gabled house silhouetted against the night sky before they lifted him out and in. Three staircases, one incredibly narrow, brought him and his burly Belgian bearers into a cramped space between roofs. “The false roof and hidden steps were built by smugglers,” Mathilde told him. “They used it to store tobacco. And they made holes for watching the attic below and the street outside,” she added. “The railway is about a hundred meters away, behind the houses opposite.”

  There was a watcher on duty, an attractive middle-aged woman named Yvette who lived downstairs with her husband and children. She was surrounded by bowls of beans.

  “Chicory for horses, haricots for soldiers, coffee for guns,” Mathilde explained. “Some women use knitting—a stitch for men, a purl for horses. You can use whatever method suits you, as long as you end with something like this.” She showed McColl a written report, with a first entry that read 2201 1VOF 28WSL&CHV 4W+4CN/5W 12CAIS. “That’s the time the train passed, along with its composition—one officers’ carriage, twenty-eight wagons for soldiers and horses, four wagons with guns, and five with artillery caissons.”

  The men who had carried him up were gone, and over the next half hour Mathilde gave him a lesson in trains. Infantry trains, cavalry trains—“nearly all horse boxes”—hospital trains, food trains, and leave trains—“when they stop, we know an attack is imminent.” Mathilde had pages of them in silhouette, showing the various types of vehicle. An artillery train, for example, usually comprised one proper carriage for the officers, nine boxcars for the lower ranks, twenty-one horse boxes, and around ten flat wagons for the guns and ammunition.

  “Who drew these?” McColl wondered out loud.

  “Your people in Holland,” Mathilde told him. “Once the watcher has compiled a report,” she went on, “someone else copies it out on papier pelure—that’s tough but very thin—in writing as small as they can manage. We have one man who can fit a thousand words on the back of a postage stamp. No one else can match him. You must just do your best.”

  “I thought you said the
watchers and copiers were different people.”

  “Usually yes, but in your case we’re going to make an exception. It’s not as if you have any other work.”

  “I guess not. And after the reports have been miniaturized?”

  “They’re rolled up tight and wrapped in a piece of rubber—a préservatif, usually. I think you English call them ‘French letters.’ Then they’re dropped off at a prearranged address and eventually collected by those who take them across the border.”

  “With each person isolated from the next one up the chain?”

  “That’s the ideal, but it’s not really possible. All we can do is minimize the contacts so that each person caught only leads to one more and gives us time to get others into hiding.”

  “What do the Germans do to those they catch?” McColl asked, expecting only one answer.

  “They shoot most of us,” Mathilde said, not disappointing him. “A few they turn and use against us, and then it’s we who pull the trigger. I hope that doesn’t shock you.”

  McColl shrugged. “Not at all.” Killing a man for serving his country in the way you would serve your own had always struck him as slightly absurd, but that was the way it worked.

  “There’s a train coming,” Yvette said softly, and soon he could hear the steady chuff of an engine climbing the valley. There wasn’t room for more than one pair of eyes at the spy hole, so he and Mathilde just listened to it pass and watched Yvette’s fingers sort beans into plates with a dexterity born of practice. “An infantry train,” Yvette said, once it had gone. “That’s three this evening. If it’s a regular division,” she told McColl, “we can expect fifty-two trains over the next four days.”

  “But there’s no way of knowing which division?”

  “We’ll know if it’s from the east,” Mathilde answered him, “because the trains will be more spaced out. And most of them stop in Liège to take on fuel and water, so our people there should get a look at the markings on the wagons and the soldiers’ shoulder straps. By the time a division reaches the area behind the front, London should know where it is and what it is.”

  In London, Caitlin busied herself with work. There was no shortage of interesting stories on the home front, and many concerned the war’s impact on women. Some developments, like the possibilities opened up by the absence of so many men, were mostly positive, while others, like the bad treatment often meted out to wives by returning soldiers, were clearly not. With a few it was hard to say. The billeting of thousands of young soldiers in towns and villages throughout the country had alarmed some influential women—notably those in organizations representing headmistresses and university women—who saw their presence as a dire threat to the morals and reputations of local girls. To counter this invasion of lustful young men, these women had set up hundreds of Women’s Patrols, who shone their flashlights at couples in parks and doorways and tried to persuade cinema managers that their lights should never be off.

  Caitlin wasn’t sure what to make of it all. The patrols were probably saving a few girls from being raped, which was no small matter. They were also—as several complainants reported—preventing other women from making love where and when they wanted to and thereby “saving them from themselves.” After joining several patrols in the big London parks and noting how many angry couples they left in their wake, she couldn’t help concluding that there had to be better way.

  The same could be said of the war, now ensconced in its second winter. The two main fronts were quiet, but the Allies seemed in retreat almost everywhere else: the evacuation of Gallipoli was imminent, the campaigns in the Balkans and Mesopotamia apparently going no better.

  Christmas arrived, out of place amid all the gloom. Caitlin spent the day in the East End, helping out at Sylvia’s café, where families were fed in shifts and sackfuls of volunteer-made toys were handed out by female Santas. Over the next few days, she tried to find out whether the troops at the front had revived the no-man’s-land fraternizations of the previous Christmas, but no such reports came in. Either Jed had been right, and the higher ranks had forbidden it, or the news had been suppressed.

  There was none from Ireland either. If a rising had been planned, it hadn’t been for Christmas.

  On New Year’s Eve, she received a long letter from Aunt Orla. Caitlin’s father had been ill but was recovering; her sister was pregnant again. The family was having a Mass said for Colm at St. Saviour’s on Christmas Eve. Orla herself had been “a bit under the weather” and, though she would never say so, was clearly hoping that Caitlin would soon come home.

  The letter made Caitlin feel homesick and changed her mind about attending the embassy party, to which all the American correspondents had been invited. It was a drunken affair, and the chore of removing hands from her shoulder, waist, and worse soon became as irritating as their owners’ conversation, which seemed overripe with cynicism. She found herself missing Jack Slaney, who had earned the right to be cynical and who, God help him, actually cared.

  She left soon after midnight and, failing to find an available cab, ended up walking west. She had heard nothing from McColl, and now, standing outside his flat in Fitzrovia, all she could remember was the day she’d stormed out, vowing never to see him again. That day she’d reached a bench in Red Lion Square before breaking down and weeping. Several people had stopped to ask if she needed help—say what you like about British reserve, they wouldn’t leave a woman to cry in peace.

  She was, she realized, feeling thoroughly sorry for herself. Which, given what others were going through, was more than a little ridiculous. Maybe 1916 would be better, but somehow she doubted it.

  In Huy, December went by, flurries of snow filling the sky and painting the slopes of the valley an aching white. McColl soon had the hang of train watching and found some pride in squeezing ever more letters onto the small sheets of papier pelure, but the days still passed by at a crawl. His leg was less painful, movement with the aid of crutch somewhat easier, and after a couple of weeks he found he could negotiate the stairs to the room below, which wasn’t much more comfortable but at least offered some relief to his latent claustrophobia.

  He’d been given the night shift, and sometimes an overcast sky made the trains hard to see, let alone categorize. On clear moonlit nights, by contrast, they were silhouetted against the snowy hillside like reproductions of the drawings sent from Holland. There seemed more of them as the month went by—perhaps the Germans were using the winter breather to move their troops around. Or maybe not. There was no way of deducing the bigger picture from an attic space in Huy—for all McColl knew, the enemy was simply using this line more and other lines less. He was just one cog in a very big machine, one that was sometimes jerked awake by a helpful driver’s whistle.

  When off-duty he either read, dozed, or did exercises to keep himself fit. A steady supply of books was provided by the bibliothèque in town, and by mid-December he had waded his way through several Zola novels and a large chunk of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine. Dumas romances and a book of Sherlock Holmes short stories in English provided some light relief, a French translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls some very dark comedy.

  The Deflandres family downstairs seemed decent people. Yvette was always ready for a friendly chat and removed his waste day after day with a cheeriness that McColl suspected he would find hard to match. Her husband, Eric, was more withdrawn at first, but a natural friendliness soon showed through. His dream was to travel, and he seemed both awed and astonished by the amazing places his guest had seen. On Christmas Day the couple invited McColl downstairs for lunch with themselves and their eight-year-old son, Philippe. The main dish was a scraggly chicken that Yvette had collected from a relative in the hills, smuggled back into town beneath a load of firewood, and roasted that morning. The smell was so delicious that McColl half expected German troops to come knocking.

  They did so two days later. The thun
derous bang on the door wasn’t a surprise—by then the whole street was aware that both ends were blocked off by soldiers, while an assortment of uniformed and plainclothes officials worked their way down each side. And something of this sort had been expected—the Germans knew that their train movements were being reported, and there were only so many streets in towns and villages with a decent view of the tracks.

  The on-duty Yvette had hurried downstairs, leaving McColl the use of the spy hole. Watching the street below, he found hope in the fact that the Germans were visiting every house. This was a fishing expedition, not the result of someone’s betrayal.

  Only a minute or so elapsed between the knock and the sound of movement below. The entrances to the attic and the roof space were in the same room, one obvious to anyone, the other concealed between one of the large cupboards that occupied two corners. McColl could hear voices now, one of them Yvette’s, and knew they were climbing the steps.

  Straining to be still, he found himself recalling games of hide-and-seek with his cousins in Fort William. Games in which the losers were not arrested and shot. His breath and wildly pumping heart sounded alarmingly loud.

  In the room below, a man was speaking French with a German accent. McColl couldn’t make out what he was saying, but the tone was typically Prussian, impatient and condescending. And then there was Yvette’s familiar voice, insisting that their attic had no window and couldn’t be used for watching the railway. “And we cannot see it from downstairs either,” eight-year-old Philippe chimed in. What was he doing there? McColl knew that the boy wouldn’t give him away on purpose, but would he be able resist a telltale glance at the ceiling?

  The voices receded—they were going back down. McColl gave them a minute, then quietly eased himself across to the spy hole to see if the Germans were leaving. One minute passed, then another. What were they doing? Were they searching the room below the attic? If they found the hidden steps, he’d have nowhere to go, but there was no point in surrender. He would shoot whoever came up, take his chances going down, and try to escape out the back. He probably wouldn’t get far, but what did he have to lose?