by John Harris
More shells began to rattle and bang above the trees. Branches and twigs, snipped off by the red-hot steel shrapnel balls, came down in a shower – followed by fluttering leaves. The soldiers, mostly inexperienced conscripts, were dashing about frantically looking for shelter. Mugs of tea and dixies of food were scattered in the panic.
Cowering half under the car with Woodyatt, Dominique had her eyes screwed shut, hands over her ears against the noise. Every now and then splinters clattered like football rattles against the vehicles.
‘Spread out! Spread out!’ the officer was shouting, then there was another flash and a crack like a giant whip and his voice stopped abruptly. A lorry went up in a blossom of flame and black greasy smoke. The soldiers were disappearing over a fold of ground at the edge of the wood to shelter in a ditch by the side of the road. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the racket stopped. By now several vehicles were burning and Woodyatt could hear moaning. He found Dominique bent over a man on the ground, sponging his face with a handkerchief that was rapidly becoming soggy from the blood that dripped into the pulped earth.
‘Come along!’ he said harshly. ‘We should be away from here.’
‘I can’t leave him.’
He disregarded her appeal and grabbed her arm. One of the soldiers jeered at him, thinking he was only interested in bolting, but Woodyatt ignored it and dragged her to the car. Miraculously, apart from a few marks, it seemed undamaged but his suitcase had been ripped open by a shell fragment.
‘That man I left will die,’ she accused.
‘So will a lot of others,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if we can find Montrouge before the Germans do, a few might not.’
He pushed her into the car and started the engine with a roar. As he moved off, other vehicles began to follow almost immediately.
Dominique sat mutely, hating her companion with her silence. They had not progressed very far south. There seemed to be hundreds of French soldiers around them and Woodyatt had unfastened the flap of his revolver holster. The men about them were the ruins of an army. Their officers had thrown in their hands and they had become a horde of drab, dusty figures lacking any morale. Here and there one or two of them tramped by with heads up, weapons still in their hands, unshaven like all the French army, which had never set a lot of store by smartness, but with something about them that showed they were not defeated. On the road junctions and in the villages women watched them pass, their eyes sad. But for the others they had nothing but contempt. Some were staring towards the east as if they expected the conquering Germans at any minute.
Ahead of them the countryside was a vast plain with shallow valleys and low hills, and along the road in front of them stretched a vast column of people. There were cars roofed with mattresses; horses and carts; wagons covered with nets carrying pigs and calves; people with bicycles or barrows; people leading donkeys, pushing prams, dragging wailing children. A few British army vehicles were trying to move in the opposite direction but were unable to make progress against the flood. After a while it all came to a halt, and a British military policeman appeared from nowhere.
‘Going the wrong way, aren’t you? – sir,’ he said. The contempt in his look as he stared at Dominique was obvious.
Woodyatt shoved Pullinger’s papers at him and, red-faced, he saluted and stepped back.
Ahead was a small town, a cluster of ugly red-brick houses with front gardens facing shabby fields. It was there that Woodyatt began to realise for the first time that France was facing defeat. A row of anti-aircraft guns which had been blown up by artificers, their split barrels like vast metal flowers, stood in the roadway. In a square a herd of cavalry horses were quite unattended, the monogram of the Republic on their saddle cloths, the air around them full of the smell of sweat and stained leather. A group of Panhard armoured cars ground up, pouring out exhaust smoke, tricolour roundels on their sides. They carried pet names – ‘Minou’, ‘Pascal’, ‘Riri’. Nearby, beyond the veil of dust that hung everywhere, girls were still piling stooks of corn in a field.
It was impossible to push through and Woodyatt stopped the car. Alongside was a church, its door wide open. Heading towards it were women wearing shawls on their heads and carrying rosaries. Dominique announced that she was going inside.
‘To light a candle,’ she said.
Woodyatt stared after her angrily. Before the war he had been inclined to regard soldiering as a low undignified business in which chilly tubes of metal known as guns had to be handled. Nevertheless, when war had broken out he had felt it his duty to join up at once. Now he had discovered that his part in the war was not at all what he had expected.
‘Speak French?’ he had been asked by the interviewing officer.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Just the chap we need.’
‘What for, sir?’
‘Intelligence, man. Intelligence.’
From there Pullinger had snatched him up and now here he was, struggling through the wreckage of a defeat with an unwilling and unsympathetic French girl, as he tried to get to Paris to unravel an ancient puzzle that everyone else in the world had forgotten.
The traffic started to move and he began to curse his missing companion. She turned up just in time for him to ease the car into a gap in the stream of vehicles.
‘How was the weather in Heaven?’
She gave him a furious look. ‘I said a prayer,’ she snapped. ‘Who was it for this time?’
‘You.’
The traffic moved steadily until it came to the centre of the town, where it halted once more. Across their path, passing over a crossroads just ahead, was another heart-rending tide of refugees – a vast black-clad column of people like the flood from a broken dam. They were Belgians and French from the border areas and they had swamped the place. They were carrying all their worldly possessions, their mattresses and bedding on the tops of cars. Some even had beds in their carts. Others had their belongings wrapped in blankets and tied to their backs. Fashionable women tottered along in high-heeled shoes, still wearing smart hats and coats. They were all short of sleep but afraid to halt and rest. An old man wheeled his wife in a barrow; others pushed perambulators. One youth lay sprawled in the gutter, exhausted.
There seemed to be thousands of them: weary-faced women, stolid-featured men, bewildered children. One overloaded cart had come to a stop and the ancient horse between the shafts hadn’t the strength to move it again. As he watched, Woodyatt became aware of the thin hum of an aeroplane engine that could be detected above the murmur of the refugees and the susurration of their movement past the car.
‘Oh, Christ!’ he said.
Dominique gave him a contemptuous look, but before she could say anything he had grabbed her arm and dragged her from the vehicle. She reacted by swinging her other arm, and hitting his head with the flat of her hand with some force. He almost flung her into the ditch.
Stukas had arrived above them and, as Woodyatt watched, the first one did a half-roll and swooped down at tremendous speed, a scream wailing from the sirens attached to the wheels. It seemed to come directly for them.
As they crouched in the ditch, Dominique clung to Woodyatt burying her face in his chest, her fingers digging into his arms. The ground seemed to heave in a cloud of yellow and grey smoke, like sea rolling on to a shore. More planes came down, one after another, and she gave little yelps of terror with every explosion. A house collapsed with a roar. Even through the din the thin screaming of children could be heard.
Then suddenly the world was silent again in a way that seemed uncanny after all the noise. Woodyatt lifted his head warily. Dominique still clung to him and he realised he had one hand behind her shoulders, pressing her to him. As their fingers unlocked, she gave him a shamefaced look.
‘I am sorry I struck you,’ she said stiffly. ‘I was angry with you.’
‘Still–’ there was an infuriating satisfaction in her words ‘–if I hadn’t gone into the church we’d have been further
forward and would probably have been blown up. Will it be like this all the time?’
‘God forbid.’
The centre of the little town was nothing but rubble. The air was filled with a high ululation of misery and terror, and with the shouts of stretcher-bearers struggling to drag people from the wreckage. Dominique rose and, drawing a deep breath, headed for the nearest spread-eagled figure. Stooping over it, she lifted an eyelid, felt the pulse, shook her head and turned away to bend over the next – a soldier whose uniform was saturated with blood. He was covered with dust and crying for water. As Woodyatt reached for his bottle, she smacked his hand away.
‘No water!’ she snapped. ‘He’s got a stomach wound.’ And she looked squarely at him. ‘Please don’t try to stop me this time,’ she said. ‘These people need me and Monsieur Montrouge will not go away.’
The bombing had effectively closed the road to the military traffic carrying reinforcements to the regiments reeling back from the frontier. Men and women were desperately working at a pile of rubble, tossing bricks aside to get at a woman trapped beneath it. Only her head and shoulders were visible, her hair was coated with plaster dust, and beside her lay an injured child. Nearby a young man was flat on his back, staring at the sky, his beret over one eye in a drunken fashion.
As he knelt alongside Dominique, Woodyatt became aware that the movement west had started again. Indifferent to the needs of the injured, the survivors had gathered their belongings. Brushing off the dust, they began to trudge on again, numbly, silently, interested only in safety. An old priest was trying to stop them, begging them to help.
It was some time before Woodyatt himself moved on again. Dominique had insisted on doing what she could until the doctors and army orderlies arrived. Woodyatt tried to help but he had no intention of moving far from the little Morris. Given half a chance, someone would steal it, he knew.
Eventually she joined him and, as the road cleared, they left the village. Beyond the houses Woodyatt stopped and dug out his maps.
‘Do you know this part of the world?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘Why?’
‘It seems damned silly to go on trying to press ahead with all these people. They’re taking the shortest route. We don’t have to.’
He opened the map and spread it over their knees as the crowd continued to shuffle past.
‘We’re on the direct Amiens–Beauvais–Paris road,’ he said. ‘I suggest we leave it. Amiens–Abbeville to the coast is going to be important soon because the Allies are bound to try to launch a counter-attack. That’s why the roads are being bombed. I suggest we try a different route.’ His finger jabbed. ‘This one, for instance, via Poix, Marseille-en-Beauvaisis, Gisors and Pontoise. Then we’d come into Paris from the other side. It’s a long way round but it will probably be clearer.’
‘Unless,’ she said sharply, ‘all the English, who lived in Paris because they thought it was more fun than their own cold country, are taking that route for Calais and the Channel coast to go home.’
He was startled at her cynicism. ‘You have a point,’ he admitted. ‘But I think we’ll chance it. We have a full tank because I filled it before I left, and two eight-litre tins in the back.’
‘You have thought of everything.’
‘You know what Napoleon said. Because a nail was lost, a horse shoe was lost, because a horse shoe was lost, a horse was lost – ‘It wasn’t Napoleon. It was Benjamin Franklin.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sure Napoleon thought it a good idea, too.’
He was beginning to wish he had never clapped eyes on her. Yet she looked attractive with her hair tumbled, her face flushed, her clothes stained with dirt, all her dignity gone.
She was silent for a long time. ‘What will happen to France?’ she asked. ‘Is she defeated?’
‘Nobody’s defeated until they think they’re defeated.’
‘I think France was defeated before it started,’ she said bitterly. ‘I suppose now there will be a reshuffle of the government. They will form a new cabinet and present themselves for inspection. The same old gang as before with some stuffed dummy in front to talk to the Germans.’ She turned and looked straight at Woodyatt. ‘I don’t know what you want from my uncle,’ she ended, ‘but if it will help to destroy that monster in Berlin, then I am willing to help.’
Eight
The journey round Paris wasn’t as easy as Woodyatt had hoped. Dominique had been right. Dozens of cars were heading north for the coast but the latest rumour was that the Germans were heading for Calais and Boulogne, and the only way to get to England was via Dieppe. The traffic was turning west at Beauvais and across their route. In addition, Pontoise had been bombed and they had to make a detour to Meulan and St Germain-en-Laye.
Woodyatt was worried. They had taken longer than expected on the short drive from Amiens. He was terrified the Germans or a German agent, directed by Zamerski, would have arrived ahead of them. The streets of St Germain were almost empty, with only a few pedestrians and few cars and taxis. Many of the cars bore Belgian registration and there was a feeling of uncertainty about the place. Nancy, Lille, Lyon and Colmar had been bombed and everybody was aware that danger was drawing nearer. Yet the invasion – though its advent ought to have been obvious – seemed to have evoked intense surprise.
All the government appeared to have done was to have replaced the Commander-in-Chief, cancelled the Whitsun holiday and brought out decree after decree curtailing civil liberties. Places of entertainment were closed, newspapers were cut to a single folded sheet and music was forbidden on the radio. All that was left were unconvincing news bulletins with ‘On les aura’ repeated ad nauseam.
It was noticeable that the identity of the Germans had changed. When they had bombed Poland, they had been referred to as ‘Les Allemands’. Now that they were bombing France they had become ‘Les Boches’ again. It was noticeable, also, that the china dogs Woodyatt had seen in the gift shops – cocking their legs against copies of Mein Kampf – had all suddenly disappeared.
There had still been no air raid on Paris, however, and Woodyatt could only assume it was because the German bombers were busy elsewhere. Nobody was admitting anything, though, and the wireless repeatedly announced, ‘La situation est sérieuse; mais elle n’est ni critique ni désespérée.’ Which, Woodyatt thought, was a hell of a thing to say after only three or four days of attack.
As they stopped for coffee, an RAF man, wearing a muffler of cotton wool and a bandage over a wound in his neck, told them the Parisians were expecting the railway stations to be bombed that night.
‘I should find somewhere to stay with a good cellar,’ he said. ‘The French are bolting from their forward airfields. So are we, come to that. But they’re doing it faster. Jerry’s not bombing them though, because he’s expecting to be needing them himself, I reckon.’
Because of the traffic, they decided to stay the night in St Germain. It wasn’t difficult to find a bed because, although refugees were pouring into Paris from the east, more were pouring out at the other side for Brittany and the south. They had to share the room but Dominique didn’t argue, sleeping fully dressed on the bed while Woodyatt dozed in a chair. She had accepted the strange ménage-a-deux and said little. But she had come to life, too, as though for years she had lived a life of unbelievable dullness and was finding the situation exciting.
Once, when he asked her how her burns were, she answered unemotionally, ‘I shall survive.’
Despite the amount of traffic, there were no buses. They were being used to bring in refugees from Reims and transport troops towards the front. But they were having problems because the Luftwaffe was bombing and machine-gunning the roads. What they had thought was lack of skill on the part of individual pilots was, in fact, policy – to clutter the roads with terrified refugees to stop reinforcements moving forward.
There were no French anti-aircraft guns, but a lot of nonsense was being offered on the wireless about the French 75s being good
for destroying tanks. There was also a lot of talk about the French genius for improvisation. Woodyatt listened cynically. Though everybody seemed to know what should be done, nobody seemed to be doing it.
Dominique looked tired and Woodyatt decided they should eat breakfast before they searched for Montrouge. As they drained their coffee he asked where he was.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Woodyatt was aware of his face growing red with anger.
‘Well, I do and I don’t,’ she explained.
‘What in the name of God does that mean?’
She flashed him an angry glance. ‘When I last saw him, he was about to move his rooms. He said he preferred to keep it quiet.’
‘Why?’
‘That was his affair.’
‘It might be mine.’
‘He said he’d leave a message for me at a bar.’
‘What’s it’s name?’
‘Au Petit Alsacien.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Montparnasse. Rue de la Gaieté.’
He bundled her out of the restaurant without speaking.
Their route led them by the War Office. As they passed, a policeman stepped into the road and held up his hand. Something was happening because there were a lot of large black cars drawn up by the pavement. Then they saw General Weygand appear. He had just replaced Gamelin as Commander-in-Chief of the French army. He looked dapper, alert and full of vitality and good humour. For a moment, Woodyatt’s hopes rose because he looked like a man in command of the situation. But, then, behind him came Marshal Pétain, the victor of Verdun. He looked solemn and resembled a doddering old woman with his stooped shoulders and white moustache. Woodyatt’s hopes sank again.
The cars moved off and they were allowed to proceed. The Petit Alsacien was a shabby little bar that was part of a hotel which looked as if it let its rooms for one night stands. Woodyatt followed Dominique inside. She seemed nervous but, to his surprise, the message was waiting. It was in an envelope and it consisted of one line. ‘Furnished apartment. 81, Rue de Vanves, Arrondissement 14.’
