The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  He laughed, telling this, and she laughed with him.

  “Your calling card,” she said.

  “It’s funny now, but the whole trip was nerve-wracking. I almost had a heart attack when I saw that incriminating trail. I was with three other airmen, and two of them were in different cars. Robert was at the head of my car. He was reading a book and paying no attention to me. Our group got off at Montauban, and the girl guided us to a park.”

  “I’m sure that was Hélène.”

  “In the park we could scatter out and pass the time for a while. Then, I think to confuse the Germans, she took us on by bus to Toulouse. Robert didn’t go to the park, and I lost sight of him. But there he was on the quai at Toulouse. The train to Pau was due in just a few minutes. Robert went to the lavatory, and the girl was reading a book on a bench. The train was late. That was a miserable hour! We couldn’t talk, couldn’t buy anything to eat or a newspaper, for fear of betraying ourselves. We all sat on various benches, checking the departure board from time to time. I concentrated on not hearing a train approaching. I wondered just how deaf I was supposed to be. Would I hear the vibrations of the train when it was still far away? Was I totally deaf or partially deaf? Why didn’t I know sign language? And would that be the same in French? I was crazed with all these questions.”

  “All the Allied aviateurs who fell into France were deaf and dumb,” she said, laughing. They laughed together. He had not imagined his tale would be so entertaining. She said, “The flu epidemic of 1917 left many people deaf and dumb, so it was plausible.”

  “Still, the Germans must have been stupid not to notice,” he said. “The French would have noticed us, wouldn’t they?”

  “Oh, they did. And no one denounced you! This was the passive résistance of the French! They say most people collaborated, but this was an example of how we resisted when there seemed to be nothing one could do. The Americans were obvious—and everyone knew! We kept quiet. Oh, excuse me, I’ve launched into my opinions. Continue, please!” She hugged his arm.

  “I had eaten most of the food your mother gave me. I tried to eat my orange the way a French workman would. Anyway, an orange was messy enough to keep people at arm’s length. Two of the men in our group—I didn’t know them at all—were behaving rather strangely, talking to each other. Although I wasn’t seated near them, I was determined to have nothing to do with them. They were going to jeopardize the whole operation. One of them went to the kiosk and bought something to eat, and he started toward me signaling that he wanted to give me some of it. I stood up, turned, and walked away. The fool. I was afraid we were going to attract the attention of the German officer who was standing at the exit to the street, checking papers. In the lulls between trains, he strolled around, gave everybody the once-over, and entertained himself by throwing pebbles at pigeons. Then a new set of guards arrived and they heil-Hitlered each other with great fanfare. I imagined them practicing that in front of the mirror. I thought about Hitler looking in the mirror and wondered what he saw.

  “Robert returned and we all boarded the train to Pau. We got there uneventfully. The Germans at the checkpoint glanced at my papers without asking any questions. I thought they probably couldn’t read French anyway, so the papers you and your mother had created worked just fine, I am happy to tell you.”

  “Maman filled them in with her left hand. She insisted on that method of disguising handwriting.”

  “It worked, and I was thankful to the bottom of my boots. I had been chiding myself for not taking a knife to those USA initials on the boots. How could I have been so careless? By the time we arrived at Pau it was the middle of the night, and Robert passed us off to a man and woman who drove us to a safe house, where there were some other airmen sheltered. We were given cheese and some kind of bread and soup. But here was the biggest surprise of all. I was totally unprepared for this. You remember that I told you about the crew of our plane. The pilot—Lawrence Webb—died at the scene, I was sure. And there was another guy, a waist gunner called Hootie Williams. I thought he was hurt pretty badly, and I didn’t know if he was captured. I was almost certain he had died. He looked bad. All during my trip through France I was nagged by thoughts of Hootie and what happened to him. Well, believe it or not, there was Hootie! In this house, sitting at the table eating soup. I can’t tell you the greeting we gave each other.

  “He was calm, though. He said, ‘Hey, Marshall, what took you so long? I’ve been waiting on you!’

  “I was astounded. And thrilled. You can’t know.

  “ ‘Well, Hootie,’ I said. ‘I always said you were the smartest one of us all. I should have known you would find your way.’

  “Hootie told me that Webb was dead and had been buried in that little village in Belgium. And he said three of the crew had been arrested.”

  Marshall paused, remembering how Hootie, his mouth stuffed with chewy bread, had praised him for the landing. Hootie hadn’t bailed out, as Chick Cochran did. Oh, no, Marshall. I knew Webb was a goner. When he said “bail out,” I knew we were too low. But Chick jumped anyway. The dope. Hootie shook his head and grinned like a hyena.

  “Many aviateurs became separated when they were shot down,” Annette was saying. “Then at the safe houses they might find each other again, or receive some news. Sometimes there were long waits.”

  “We didn’t know at the time that everybody else from our crew had survived and would eventually make it home.” Marshall laughed. “Hootie told a tale about a woman who guided him on a train, and when the German officers were approaching, this anonymous woman pulled him into a headlock and kissed him, smothering his face with her hair. She figured the Germans wouldn’t break up a pair of lovers, I guess. I didn’t know whether to believe him, but Hootie said, ‘Marshall, that kiss couldn’t be repeated in heaven! I never found out who she was. She got me to where we were going and then she took a run-out powder.’ ”

  “That was a strategy,” Annette said. “Robert and I played sweethearts, so no one would suspect—”

  “Hootie stayed with a family in Belgium who kept him out of the hospital where the Germans would have found him. He had been wounded, but not seriously, as I had thought. He was soon on his feet. While he was with the Belgian family, he started helping the Resistance! He worked with the explosives.

  “Hootie told me the family was named Lechat. I did not run across that name again until this spring when I went back to the crash site. And, Annette, the people told me that a boy’s father was shot for convoying one of our crew. It was Monsieur Lechat. He paid with his life for taking care of Hootie.”

  Marshall paused, recalling Hootie’s crazy laugh. “I didn’t know this until I went back to Belgium this spring.”

  “These are difficult recognitions,” she said, leaning on his shoulder. “Go on. It is hard, n’est-ce pas? I am listening.”

  “Hootie had gotten word that Campanello, our navigator, was one of those who went to the stalag. We weren’t too worried about POWs because of the Geneva convention. We didn’t know that the Germans were starting to get a little loose on that point and were sending some POWs to Buchenwald. I only heard about this years later.”

  “Yes,” Annette said. “That was so.”

  “Hootie had made his way through France by taking chances and pulling his wheeler-dealer ways. He was charming that way. He was the biggest daredevil I ever knew. He claimed he never went hungry in France.

  “The next afternoon four of us were picked up in a dilapidated truck and driven through miles of foothills. We were let out at the end of a farm and told to walk down a stony path through some trees. We were off the road, so we were relatively safe. There was a French guide with us who would bring up the rear and be the translator. I don’t remember that he had much to say, though.

  “It was growing dark, and the trail started to get twisty, so we were glad when we met the guide who would lead us across. He was a Basque who knew only a few English words and apparently had little
interest in anything except getting us to follow him at breakneck speed in total silence. He had some rope sandals for us, some clumsy strung-together things that I refused to wear. First, he demanded it; then he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘It’s your funeral.’ ”

  “Espadrilles,” she said.

  “I called them Basket shoes. The other guys took them because their shoes weren’t so great, but I wouldn’t part with my USA boots. The night before, I had gouged out the letters with my knife.

  “We carried small knapsacks. I still had a few items from my escape kit sewn into my pants legs, and some soap your mother had given me. The Basque guide, a big fellow, carried a huge pack on his back that seemed no more troublesome to him than carrying a pillow. The French guide, coming along behind us, was smarter. He had only a small backpack.”

  Marshall paused, remembering the tension that oppressed the group, and the profound darkness.

  “The trail was narrow, like an animal track, and we couldn’t see. There was a misty rain, and we all had the sniffles. The walking was easy at first. We were told to be absolutely quiet. We weren’t anywhere near the border patrols or guard posts, but we still had to be quiet. Then it got very dark—I mean pitch-black—and we had to hold on to each other by the belt or the jacket.

  “Trying to be quiet, trying to stay awake, and not breaking the pace—it was worse than boot camp, that’s for sure. It was cold, but we were moving so vigorously that we were sweating. As we walked, I kept up my strength by telling myself I was responsible for the others. It was my duty. I was an officer. There was Hootie, and two guys who had bailed out near Bordeaux—enlisted men. And then there were two others, British civilians. I hoped they weren’t spies. If we got caught with spies in our group … But among us Americans I had the highest rank, so I tried to make sure we kept moving along in good order.

  “After a few hours, we came to a long swinging bridge across a ravine. Somehow I could tell the ravine below was really deep. There was a sound of rushing water, but it was very faint, far away. It could have been half a mile down, I suppose.

  “The crossing was slow. It was like being on a chain gang—a sniffling, blind chain gang, inching ahead. We just felt our way. Someone up ahead—I think it was one of the Englishmen—stumbled and we all swayed, holding on to the guide rope with one hand and the coattail of the guy ahead with the other. I doubt if the Basque guide held on; he was sure-footed as a mountain goat. But the rest of us were saying our prayers, swaying out there over nothingness. It took us so long to get across, the sky was getting light by the time we all made it.

  “Soon after that we came to a barn and bedded down for the day. In the light we could see where we had been, and where we would go that night. We could see that the side of a slope ahead was a steep jumble of rocks. It seemed so treacherous we could not imagine how it could be crossed.

  “It was cold in the barn,” he said. “I was probably dressed more warmly than the others because your family had outfitted me so well, and I had a sort of wool neck warmer that I kept in my jacket pocket. I had brought it with me from England.

  “After resting that day, we took off in the dusk and plodded up one peak after another; zigzagging up switchbacks, then coming down in order to go up again. A misstep and we’d go ass over teakettle. All night again we were climbing and climbing, and the track twisted around on itself, and the guides wouldn’t let us stop.

  “The trail was steep and cobbled, and even before we gained any altitude, we slipped and slid through patches of snow. Mostly it was great sweeps of scratchy vegetation that tore at us. Then it got rocky. The Basque didn’t slow down at all, but we were dog tired. I can tell you that a guy can be a pilot of a jumbo jet and yet be afraid of heights. I’ve never confessed that before. But I was afraid of heights that night, and I guess I have been ever since.”

  “That is reasonable,” she said. “Go on.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “At dawn we were in a clearing, and soon we arrived at a farmhouse. We learned that we were still in France. This was a Basque family. None of us could understand their language. But they were generous, and they fed us.

  “We fell asleep on straw mats in a sort of lean-to behind the house. We slept till dusk. They gave us some more food, and then we hit the rocky road again.

  “We were bushed, and our feet were sore and torn up. If it hadn’t been for the pace of that Basque guide, and if we’d had good equipment and enough food and rest, we might have done better. But we had to rush along in the dark. I couldn’t have done it without some Benzedrine from my escape kit. All my life I’ve always thought I could make it, whatever jam I was in. But on those mountains there were times when I knew I wasn’t going to.”

  Marshall laughed ruefully, ashamed of himself.

  “But you’re here,” she said gently, laying her head on his shoulder.

  “I’m not sure how to tell this next part. I know it doesn’t begin to compare to what you went through, but … Are you cold?”

  “No. I’m all right. But yes, your arm around me feels good.”

  The young guide, Roland, appeared in the half-light outside the hotel. “Do you need anything?”

  “Non, merci,” said Marshall.

  “We will be on the trail at eight in the morning.”

  “Merci. Bonne nuit.”

  “Bonne nuit.”

  Marshall continued. “The trail was treacherous, but despite everything, I was glad to be on my way. The cold, misty rain stopped when we got to the snow. At first it was just a dusting, but soon we got to places where it was up to our knees. Our guide just mushed on through and left us to hop in his footprints. Then it got even deeper. Sometimes we sank in to our waists, but we got through it. And then we trudged down the other side of the mountain. Hallelujah, I thought. We’re in the home stretch. But we only went down a short way before we started climbing another slope. And that’s how it went for hours. Up and down. We had hardly any food, and we didn’t stop to rest or eat. The aim was to cross the border while it was still dark so we wouldn’t be seen out in the open above the tree line.

  “The border was near, and there were sentinels and a German guard post two hundred yards from the narrow path where we had to sneak across. There was a dim crescent moon and enough reflected light to see the path—just barely. The nearest sentinel was moving back and forth ahead of us. We had to wait till his back was turned, when he was moving away, and then two of us could make a break for it. Then the rest of us waited until the sentinel came back; when he turned away again, two more of us could go.

  “The Brits went first, when the Basque signaled. We waited. The sentinel returned. We could see his silhouette and the guard post on a promontory. We were up pretty high, but we were still below the guard post.

  “The other guys sneaked through. I was hanging back with Hootie, and it came our turn. We had just climbed a steep path to the side of a precipice, and we were panting. It was steep, and the air was getting thinner. I started ahead, toward the path that I could barely see. I saw the shadow of the guide. Hootie was just behind me, I thought. Suddenly there was a burst of light, and then gunshots. My instinct told me to run. I ran like hell, toward the path ahead, toward the Basque.

  “I heard a whimper and a clatter of rocks. I looked back and I couldn’t see Hootie. He wasn’t there. Behind me was the cliff we had just climbed. A searchlight was sweeping across, and there were more gunshots. I couldn’t run back. The rear guide, the Frenchman, was herding us on, into a thick grove. There was nothing we could do, he said. I wanted like hell to go back, but he wouldn’t let me. And I could see he was right.”

  “That is what the guides did,” Annette said. “They just kept going. It was necessary. It was too dangerous otherwise. I know of such journeys.”

  “So we were across the border, but Hootie was gone. And before long the guides were gone, too. The French guy slipped away near the border. He headed off to the side, to cross back into Fr
ance somewhere farther along the border. The Basque led us a mile or two into Spain, but then he picked up speed and just left us behind.

  “We were in Spain, but we had no food, and we weren’t really sure what to do next. And my head was whirling because of Hootie. I don’t think I’ve ever been so heavy-hearted. I had reached my goal. I had made it out of France, finally, but it felt like the worst day of my life.”

  Marshall quit talking, and Annette waited. They sat quietly, side by side, for several minutes before Marshall took up the story again.

  “It was less rocky there, and then it was grassy and we came tumbling down, sliding on the fresh grass. There I was, in Spain with four strangers who might have included spies for all I knew, but we were still in mountainous terrain with no clue to what was ahead for us.

  “I won’t bore you with our wanderings. You know how we were arrested by some Spanish border guards and detained. But that was pretty much just for show. We wound our way through Spain and then to Gibraltar, where we were processed back to England.

  “I never saw Hootie again. He simply vanished. Except for that one whimper, there was no noise, no cry. It was just darkness. I don’t know if he was shot or if he simply fell from the cliff. That episode is something I’ve played over and over, as if it had a meaning, some symbolism for my life. What could I have done differently?

  “I was able to tell his family what happened—how he seemed to disappear. I wrote to them. After that, I tried hard never to think of that night, but it kept coming back to me. How could I be sure he was dead? I wasn’t sure the shot hit him. I assumed that slipping over that ledge was fatal. But I don’t know. I wondered—should I have gone back?”