Blue Noon

by Robert Ryan

  She shrugged. ‘Harry says maybe four days. He is waiting for the other guide to come back. You will have to be split up into twos and threes, so we need all our—’

  ‘You said that last week.’ A sulky voice from the rear.

  ‘And our man still isn’t back,’ she said firmly. ‘It can take four days, it can take four weeks to get back through. It isn’t just a case of hopping an express, you know.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Styles, shooting a glance at the moaner. ‘We wondered if you could get some more cards and perhaps some games? Chess—’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ From her bag she took some bread and sausage, the night’s supper. ‘I have some food. Not much, between twe—’

  Odile stopped and looked up, scanning the barn. She didn’t have to do a headcount to know they were a few bodies short. She tried to keep her voice level. ‘Where are the others? It’s getting dark.’

  Styles cleared his throat and shifted his weight from foot to foot. ‘Thing is, Maddox and Jenkins were getting a little, uh, stir crazy—’

  ‘Driving us crazy more like.’ The moaner again.

  ‘So I sent them out for a walk.’

  A walk? she wanted to screech. A fucking walk? Instead she asked calmly, ‘When?’

  ‘Lunch time.’

  Now she couldn’t keep the exasperation at bay. ‘Luncht—? In broad daylight? Sent them where?’

  ‘Well, into town. Maddox speaks quite good French really—’

  ‘Which town?’

  The house was between two settlements. West was Monveaux, to the east, much nearer, was Madeleine.

  ‘I … uh … They turned left at the gate.’

  Monveaux. She threw the food down on the floor and ran outside, fumbling with the bicycle lock, stabbing herself with the key in her haste and cursing. She was aware of Styles looming behind her.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry—’

  The lock snapped open and she stood. ‘It didn’t occur to you they might be taken? That even now they are telling the Germans about this barn, about Paul, about Roland, about me?’

  Styles’s throat went dry. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said with as much sarcasm as she could muster as she pedalled off to get Harry, ‘you’ve done enough.’

  After she had cycled into Monveaux and located Maddox and Jenkins, she went in search of Harry, appalled at what she had found. Harry would know what to do, if they could get there in time.

  She found her husband in the Café Football in the back streets of Madeleine, elbows on the zinc bar, laughing at a dirty joke with the proprietor, ignoring the fact that there were a trio of Germans playing babyfoot in the corner.

  Harry looked up and smiled when he saw her. He was slightly drunk, she could tell from the lopsided grin. He went to indicate a drink for her but the flash of anger in her eyes stopped him short. He mouthed: ‘What?’

  ‘Trouble.’

  She didn’t need to repeat it. The word chased the clouds from his brain, sobering him up at once. He glanced in the Germans’ direction, but they were intent on their game.

  ‘You have your bike?’ she asked.

  He nodded, threw some coins on the bar and together they rode through the darkening streets, aware that the curfew had been moved yet again after the RAF bombing raids, and they had a mere thirty minutes to get Maddox and Jenkins out of Monveaux and to safety. As they cycled, Odile explained the situation, and Harry squeezed the handles of his bicycle so hard, it wobbled under him.

  ‘In English?’

  Odile nodded.

  ‘Oh, fuck a duck.’

  They parked up in a sidestreet next to the Monveaux Marie and walked across the cobbled square, with its statue of Pétain—left standing by the Germans, unlike Madeleine’s effigy of Foch, torn down because of his authorship of the hated 1918 Armistice—towards the café where she had spotted Maddox and Jenkins.

  They strolled past the open doors arm in arm, and Harry casually glanced in. Yes, there they were, at the bar, slumped down, singing sporadically here and there, old Perrot, the nervous-looking owner, trying in vain to quieten them down. Harry also took in the uniforms of the two dozen or more German soldiers who were indulging in a hearty sing-song at the café tables.

  Fifty metres past he stopped and took a deep breath. ‘I think they are called Kampfgruppe Ostendorf. They are here for rest and refitting after the Eastern Front. A little light occupation duty after being slaughtered in the Demyansk Pocket.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  He shrugged. King still regularly went through each of the regiments in the region with him so he could quiz those pilots that might have seen troop movements. ‘You pick things up.’

  ‘Does it matter who they are?’

  ‘The Kampfgruppe Ostendorf is part of the Totenkopf regiment,’ he explained. ‘Our friends are singing four-part harmony with the Death’s Head division of the Waffen-SS. In English.’

  All Marcus Perrot wanted was a quiet life, a chance to run his bar for the locals, as he always had. It was not popular with the Germans, normally. They preferred the Golden Gate or Jerome’s, where there might be women to ogle or chat up. He only had Collette, his toothless waitress, and none of the soldiers were that desperate. Tonight, however, the Occupiers had blessed him with their company, mainly because all the empty seats meant twenty of them could gather round and start their singing.

  As they trooped in, he had warned the two men at the bar to leave. True, one of them spoke decent enough French, but with an accent that meant any local could tell he was English straight away. It was just possible that some of the Germans might also pick it up, especially as he was sure a couple of the new recruits, the fresh-faced kids without the hardened stares of the veterans, were Alsatians, now liable for military service since their home region had been incorporated into the Fatherland. French was their first language, or had been, until the Germans had started fining those who still used it in public. They’d spot the wayward vowels immediately.

  However, it soon became clear that the English pair thought this was some kind of jape, something to tell the chaps back home, regardless of the fact that they would probably be shot if they were discovered. And him: he was sure serving drinks to airmen was a crime against the Reich. Everything else was.

  The two Englishmen carried on drinking, winking to him now and then, even joining in the songs when they knew the words. All Perrot could do was keep the wine flowing in the direction of the Germans in the hope of distracting them, but the alcohol was beginning to make them maudlin. At first it had been popular songs, ‘Lili Marlene’, ‘Liebling’, ‘Wenn Ich Traurig Bin’, ‘Hannelore’, that sort of thing, but now the deeper voices of the veterans had taken over, and the unblooded recruits could only imagine what the old timers—some of them as ancient as thirty—were seeing when they sang ‘Ich hatteinen Kameraden’ or ‘Alte Kameraden’. At least the Englishmen found it hard to join in the choruses on these.

  Now, though, the two were getting dangerous. One of them had started humming ‘We’re Going to Hang Out Our Washing on The Siegfried Line’, and a couple of the nearest Germans had looked over, puzzled. The pair were whispering together and sniggering and the big bruiser of a sergeant was glaring their way. It suddenly dawned on Perrot that it wasn’t the fact that they might be English that had piqued his interest, but that they might be Frenchmen showing disrespect to a glorious fighting regiment and their fallen comrades.

  Perrot hissed: ‘I think you should leave. Now. They are beginning to notice you.’

  ‘Fuck ’em,’ said one, and they both laughed.

  The sergeant was on his feet now, and had stopped singing. Some of his comrades had begun to snuffle, thinking of particular friends they had left behind, last seen crushed into the frozen mud by T-34 tracks. The big man had taken half a dozen steps towards the two at the bar when he was suddenly pushed aside, almost spinning him through a full circle. He shook his head at the impudenc
e, until he realised it was a woman who had barged by.

  ‘Albert, you drunken old sot,’ she shouted at Maddox. ‘Look at you. I suppose you’ll come rolling home having pissed your pants, then think you can climb on top of me? Well think again!’

  Odile snatched the glass of red wine and threw it into Maddox’s startled face. The soldiers stopped singing and began to guffaw. Not all of them could understand the words that Odile was shouting, but they could certainly pick up the gist.

  ‘You want to keep a wife, you come home right now. Right now.’ She reached up and pulled him off the stool by his ear, tugging him towards the door. Maddox began to yell, which caused the soldiers to bang the table in delight. A few clapped their support for a wife at the end of her tether. Still yelling abuse and describing his habits in the most vulgar terms, Odile was almost at the door, when the German sergeant realised he had one victim left and turned towards Jenkins.

  ‘You!’ yelled Odile. ‘Philippe. Yes, you. Come and help me get this oaf into bed. Now, or I’ll castrate you like one of your pigs.’

  Jenkins slid off the stool, collected his cap, and followed, looking down at the floor as the big veteran glowered at him, daring him to make one false move, such as catching his eye. Perrot reached under the counter and brought out a bottle of schnapps which he offered to the sergeant, with his compliments. The German grabbed it, managed something between a smile and a snarl, and wandered back to his table, the two rude Frenchmen at the bar suddenly forgotten, and began to lead his new comrades in the Division’s filthy version of ‘Leibe Wohl, du kleine Monika’.

  Eighteen

  WHAT WAS THE POINT of having a Waffen-SS Abteilung, a battalion of Germany’s most blooded fighting troops, on your doorstep if you weren’t going to use it? Just a show of strength was all Pieter Wolkers had in mind, a big stick to wave over villages for future reference. Diels had resisted Wolkers’s plan for a week or two, and when he did finally put it to the Abteilung commander, SS-Obersturmführer Knochen, he found he was keen to let some of his men ‘stretch their legs’ as he put it. Wolkers had made sure Knochen understood him, that this was not a punitive action, simply ‘housekeeping’.

  The village of Monveaux was still sleeping when the company of 150 men under Knochen pulled up their trucks two kilometres away from the main square. Surprise was everything. It was the same principle as the lightning searches of every passenger arriving at Lille station. That had yielded thousands of kilos of contraband goods and dozens of travellers with incorrect papers. Now Wolkers would see what the search of a whole village would generate. He had picked on Monveaux because of reports of suspicious characters in cafés and bars speaking English a few weeks previously.

  Roadblocks were set up to prevent anyone entering or leaving, and the Obersturmführer spread his men into a loose circle, a man every few metres, until the village was surrounded.

  The noise of the cockerels and dogs was joined by three sharp blasts on a whistle and the men began to close the ring, pausing to rip open every shed and barn they came to. The circle tightened as they approached the outskirts and the soldiers bunched into four-man teams, each one taking a house in turn, pushing the occupants out, to be herded to the central square, then gutting the house, looking for contraband, radios, fugitives, anything.

  Wolkers and Knochen drove into the square and waited under the statue of Pétain as bewildered locals, mostly still in their nightclothes, drifted towards them. A machine-gun post at either end acted as magnetic poles, repelling the gathering crowd towards the centre.

  The first crackle of gunfire made Wolkers start.

  ‘Relax,’ said Knochen. ‘They know what they are doing.’

  More shots. A distant scream. ‘It’s a search mission,’ Wolkers reminded Knochen. ‘No instant reprisals.’

  An older man with a livid bruise the shape of a rifle butt on his face staggered towards them, supported by his wife. They began yelling but Knochen signalled his Überscharführer to get them out of his sight. Wolkers began to feel uneasy. ‘Obersturmführer—’

  Knochen silenced him with a wave. He was a young man and had been in the regiment since its formation, when its main duty was to guard the KZs, concentration camps, and keep order. So he was familiar with how to deal with civilians. His doubts about reprisals had been buried a long time ago. ‘I was thinking. We could transport all the men, evacuate the women. Burn the village. That would be a stronger example.’

  ‘No,’ said Wolkers feebly. ‘This will be quite enough.’

  The square was crowded now, the people huddling together for warmth, the children sobbing with cold and fear. The bodies parted as a young man was pushed roughly through and onto the cobbles. The exchange was fast. He had a radio, a transmitter of some sort. Wolkers had barely formulated the thought of how to use the equipment to his advantage when one of the soldiers raised his rifle and shot the boy in the chest, flinging him back towards the villagers.

  ‘For God’s sake—’ Wolkers protested. ‘Obersturmführer, please. This is an intelligence operation.’ He knew he was wasting his breath. He was a civilian, a mere onlooker, with no authority to impose his will.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Knochen. ‘We’ve had plenty of practice with subduing hostile populations.’

  Some of the soldiers appeared carrying ladders, a man at each end. Eight, nine, twelve of them. Twelve ladders. Why? Wolkers watched half a dozen soldiers run at the double, each carrying a coiled length of rope. He could hear his heart thumping in his chest.

  ‘Listen, listen to me. Do you know what the population will do after this,’ he spat in alarm. ‘How they will react?’

  Knochen grabbed his arm. ‘I will tell you what they will do, Wolkers. They will do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because after today they will know what will happen if they do.’

  Wolkers watched the tightly twisted length of hemp reach skywards, and hang there in the morning light, stationary for a second, like the Indian rope trick, before it collapsed, and draped itself over the waiting arm of a lamppost.

  It was then the members of the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf found the three airmen.

  The early morning phone call to Harry was short. Something is happening at Monveaux. There was a panic in the woman’s voice, and the line went dead before Harry could ask who it was, as if the connection had been cut.

  Within five minutes he and Odile were cycling to the village where, just two weeks before, she had managed to avert disaster for Maddox and Jenkins. For all of them, in fact.

  They passed the empty trucks and half-tracks first, crowded together at the edge of the field, a couple of hard-faced soldiers milling around, machine pistols slung low. Harry did a quick estimate. A hundred, perhaps more, could be seated in those vehicles. He felt his gut twitch.

  ‘I think we should go back,’ said Odile softly.

  As they rounded the final bend on the approach road, they could see two six-wheeled armoured cars nose to tail across the road into Monveaux, a wall of field grey uniforms in front of them.

  ‘Turn around,’ said Odile.

  ‘Only if we want to practise catching bullets with our arse cheeks,’ said Harry. ‘Just stay calm.’

  They freewheeled to a halt and as the fresh-faced private approached, Harry said, ‘What’s going on, Grenadier?’

  The young man’s eyes darted about nervously. He lowered his voice. ‘I would turn back if I were you.’

  ‘No,’ boomed a thick voice. An SS-Rottenführer, a corporal, swaggered over and indicated he wished to see their papers. They were handed over, given a cursory glance and flung back at them. ‘What is your business?’

  This was no time to be an inspector of mines or a dumb mute. ‘We have a café,’ said Harry. ‘In town.’

  There was the rattle of gunfire from this distance. A flight of birds passed overhead, and Harry thought he could detect panic in the rhythm of their wing beats. He kept his face impassive. Odile was shaking slightly, but her face, too, showed
nothing.

  The SS-Rottenführer stroked his chin. ‘Two choices. You are welcome to go in.’ The deeper thud of a heavy machine gun came up the road. ‘Or you can piss off now.’

  Harry and Odile reversed the bikes and began to pedal, slowly at first, then faster.

  ‘Jesus Mary Mother of Christ,’ hissed Odile. ‘What are they doing?’

  Harry didn’t answer. They both knew what the SS were doing.

  ‘Where are you going now?’

  ‘The watertower at Wallous. It’s the only vantage point we’ve got round here. Have we any binoculars?’

  ‘At home, yes.’

  ‘I’ll pick them up. You stay there till I get back.’

  ‘I want to come with you.’

  He looked over at her. ‘No you don’t, Odile.’

  He was right, she didn’t. She didn’t want him to go either.

  The image through the cheap binoculars was blurred and chromatically distorted around the edges. Harry lay on his stomach on the cold metal of the water tower, pressing himself as flat as he could. If he was caught with binoculars, then there was no doubt what the Waffen-SS would do to him.

  It took a few minutes before Harry pieced together what he was seeing. A German officer and a civilian at the centre of things, standing opposite the bar Odile had pulled Maddox from. On the ground, at least two dead bodies. Along one edge of the square, the bulk of the population, covered, but unharmed. The heavy machine guns he had heard were pointed at the crowd, but there was no evidence that they had been fired into it. Perhaps over their heads. It was only then that he saw the pilots, right at the periphery of his field of view, hands bound behind their backs. One of them looked as if he had been mistreated, his head lolled to one side; the others were relatively upright and alert.

  Harry looked long and hard at them, scanning the faces. Not his. He had never seen them before. Another ratline, someone else in the business, God help them.

  There was activity on the far side now. A tall house, with a German soldier on the balcony, pushing off the flower pots so they fell onto the pavement. Harry desperately needed a drink, his throat was dry. Two ladders were being pushed up against the balustrade from below. The man up top was wrapping something round the metal, which he let go.