View from the Beach

by JH Fletcher

  It was a town of closed and shuttered houses facing directly on to the streets. Of churches and bells. A square, crusted with muddied snow in December, with a statue of Joan of Arc in the middle. Gautier was the sort of place where nothing ever happened. After his experiences in the East Franz was more than happy that things should stay that way. He wanted to live, to go into whatever might lie beyond the war, to find peace. Yet suspected that true peace, after all that had happened, would be hard — perhaps impossible — to find.

  In the middle of May 1944 Franz stood to one side of the cobwebbed window in the upper room of a farmhouse five miles from Gautier, watching the yard and the hill beyond. The stone wall around the yard was grey, the barn’s tiled roof a vivid orange against the blue of the sky. Beyond the barn the green slope of the hill rose to a crest of jumbled stone. He could just make out the track that wound its way down the hill between outcrops of rock.

  Plenty of cover, he thought. Could be tricky. I daren’t put anyone out on the slope, though. If I do that the maquis will spot them and this whole operation will fall to pieces.

  That mustn’t happen. Things were getting out of hand quickly enough as it was. The bastards had stepped up their activities a lot in the last couple of weeks. Phone lines cut, rail tracks dynamited, shots fired at the police. No end to it.

  Why call them bastards? he thought. They’re only doing what you would do in their place. We can’t let them get away with it, though, or the next thing they’ll be pointing their guns at us.

  At one time such an idea would have been ludicrous; not any longer. Rumours were everywhere. The Allies were coming. From the north. From the south. The Allies weren’t coming at all. It was impossible to know what to believe. What was fact was that the Second SS Panzer Division had been pulled out of Russia and was now stationed at Montaubon, a hundred and fifty miles to the south. They wouldn’t have been there if the High Command had not believed in the invasion. The maquis were rumoured to be telling everyone that in six months the Germans would be gone. Perhaps they were right but it was Franz’s job to make sure they weren’t. Which was why the present operation had to succeed. Some peasant, no doubt fed up with the maquis for always helping themselves to food and tobacco, had tipped off the security forces that the local commanders were meeting that evening in the barn of the old farmhouse. To round them up would be an enormous blow to the Resistance.

  Their informant had told them that the men would make their way to the farm by means of the track across the hill but had not known when the meeting was taking place. When they had questioned him earlier the owner of the farm had denied knowing anything about the meeting at all. Hardly surprising. They would never risk coming in daylight, Franz thought. It had to be after dark. Which meant they would be looking for a signal to let them know the coast was clear.

  He turned to one of his men. ‘Get that farmer in here. I want to talk to him again.’

  He was an old man, sturdy and bow-legged, with a huge moustache. He did not seem afraid at all.

  Franz said, ‘This meeting tonight. What time does it start?’

  The furious-looking eyes stared through him. ‘I told you already. I know nothing about any meeting.’

  ‘There’s a meeting, all right. I want to know the time.’

  ‘I know nothing about it.’

  ‘Our informant —’

  ‘Looks like he knows what’s going on better than I do. Maybe you’d better ask him.’

  Franz hated what he knew would happen if he could not persuade the old man to talk. He won’t, he thought. Later, yes. They always do. Not to begin with. He will say no and Muller will do disgusting, unspeakable things to him and then he’ll talk. We shall catch the men if they come and the ones we don’t kill we shall question. They’ll talk, too, in the end. When we’ve got everything out of them we’ll burn this farm and half a dozen others as an example and this old man and the rest, what’s left of them, will be shot anyway. If they don’t decide to hang them instead.

  Oh God I am so sick of it all, he thought. I wish he would talk, that’s all.

  He would not.

  ‘We know about the meeting —’

  Nothing.

  ‘We know they are coming tonight —’

  Nothing.

  ‘We know —’

  ‘We know —’

  Nothing.

  ‘You give me no choice. You see that?’

  He called Muller. The interrogator. Left him to get on with it. He went down the steep flight of stairs, walked through the house. He passed a massive chest of drawers, a wardrobe, a bed with brass rails. They brushed his sleeve; he did not see them. The door stood open to a plastered porch. Beyond the porch hens pecked in the yard. Bees murmured. He stood in the middle of the downstairs room. Waiting. Listening.

  Time passed. He should have stayed, observed what was happening; to leave it to others was the coward’s way. He could not help it. It was bad enough to rip out one’s soul without watching the inch by inch process of doing so.

  The first sound, a murmur of protest no louder than the bees. Franz froze, knuckles white. The sound was repeated. And again.

  Hens clucked. A rooster strutted, red and chestnut fire in the sunlight. Franz stood with his forehead against the unevenly plastered wall, waiting for …

  The first scream.

  He needed to get out of the house, get away. A landscape opened before his closed eyes. Infinite, empty. Ochre forms patterned the rocks. Colours: russet, red, yellow, blue. Air rippled like liquid. Shapes danced. A tree, dry as fossils, clawed out of the rock. Skeleton branches patterned the ground with violet shade.

  God preserve me.

  Boots sounded on the stairs. Franz turned. Muller said, ‘He’s ready.’

  Words gushed like puke.

  ‘Je ne sais pas. I do not know. They said they would but they could have changed their plans. They never say what they’re going to do. No one knows. No one.’

  The farmer, naked now, lay on the bare boards of the attic. His body jerked spastically, legs and arms leaping. His face was a mask of blood, the teeth gone. The toothless mouth worked. The words were blurred, hard to decipher.

  Franz leant close. ‘When?’

  ‘Eight. But I told you, I don’t know —’

  ‘What is the signal?’

  ‘A light. Up here. In the window.’

  Automatically Franz glanced at it. The dust-smeared glass, the cobwebs, were spangled with droplets of blood. He turned his head to look at the SD man. ‘Any chance he’s lying?’

  A crow of protest from the prone figure thrashing at their feet.

  Muller stared judiciously at his handiwork. ‘Doubt it. Can check him out some more, if you want.’

  Franz shook his head. ‘Leave him.’ To the farmer he said, ‘If I find out you’ve lied to me —’

  ‘No! No!’

  It was dark. Through the attic window Franz could just make out the outline of the hill against the sky. He looked at his watch. Ten to eight. He took the lamp and placed it in the window, went back downstairs. In the corner of the living room the farmer lay where they had chucked him. His breathing was thick and rasping with pauses between each breath. He had told them he had not been going to the meeting, had simply agreed to let the maquisards use the barn. Franz believed him, had arranged his men to cover the only entrance. There was nothing else he could do. Only wait.

  Eight o’clock. Nothing. Five past. Nothing. Quarter past. Nothing.

  ‘They aren’t coming.’ Muller’s whisper barely louder than the breathing of the tortured man.

  It began to look like it.

  ‘We’ll give them a bit longer.’

  Eight-thirty.

  Eight-forty.

  A soft tap on the glass, twice repeated. The signal that men were coming down from the hill.

  ‘That’s it!’

  They waited, nerves like wire. Another tap, repeated once this time.

  ‘They’ve gone into t
he barn …’

  They would have brought their own lookouts, that was certain. The farmer had not known how many would be coming to the meeting so there was no telling whether they had all arrived.

  ‘We’ll give them another ten minutes, see if anyone else turns up.’

  Ten minutes later: ‘Go!’

  Lights. Charging figures. The barn door kicked in. Six faces whipped up from the papers spread on the wooden table. White in the guttering candlelight. Far too late the men moved, scrambling to draw guns, to fight back. A machine pistol sprayed bullets into the roof, put a stop to any nonsense like that.

  TWENTY

  A week after the arrests Captain Scholz, the fifty-five year old dentist who commanded the battalion, ordered Franz to report urgently to his office. Where the atmosphere was as taut as wire.

  ‘Sir?’

  Scholz moistened his lips with a nervous tongue. ‘Early this morning the Allies began a series of landings in Normandy.’

  The news should have appalled but did not. It was better to know. The uncertainty had been driving them mad for weeks.

  ‘There is no cause for alarm,’ Scholz said. ‘We’ll soon throw them back into the sea. But it may create problems locally for a day or two.’

  In that at least he was right. Early the following morning Franz was awakened by the thud of an explosion. He threw on his clothes, grabbed his rifle. He peered out of the window but it was still too dark to see anything.

  In the regimental office Scholz had a telephone jammed to his ear. A group of old men, faces as grey as their uniforms, watched him anxiously.

  Scholz put down the phone. In a voice of doom he said, ‘The maquis is attacking the town.’

  Franz looked at the old men. He was the only one in the room who was under forty. Most were a lot older. A sorry crew for fighting but they had plenty of arms and ammunition and with luck the maquis would have few battle-seasoned men.

  ‘Sir, what do you want us to do?’

  The captain turned on him. Anger flared. His voice was shrill. ‘What do you think I want? Drive them off the streets, of course. Clear out the town.’

  Easily said.

  Franz went out of the room. In the next office more old men were clustered around the windows, taking pot shots at an enemy that might be there.

  God help us, Franz thought. ‘Don’t waste your ammunition. Only shoot when you’ve got something to shoot at.’

  Rudi Behn grinned at him. Rudi was a man of his own age who had lost most of one foot to a mine in North Africa. The same episode had also cost him two fingers of his left hand but he could cover the ground reasonably well when he had to and could still use a rifle.

  ‘You’d better come with me,’ Franz told him.

  ‘We going to chase them off?’ Rudi asked.

  ‘With these old farts?’

  ‘What do we do, then?’

  ‘First we’ll find out what’s going on.’

  They went out into the street and stood with their backs flat against the wall of the building. Franz flicked an eyebrow cautiously around the corner. Two hundred yards away he could see a blue haze of gun smoke, hear the intermittent stammer of firing.

  ‘The school,’ Rudi said.

  ‘The second platoon’s billeted there.’ Franz listened. There was a lull, then the gunfire came heavier than before.

  ‘We going to give them a hand?’

  ‘We’re trying to find out what’s going on, not get ourselves killed.’

  ‘We can’t just leave them.’

  ‘All in good time. By the sound of the firing there must be a dozen of them at least. Probably more.’

  From the school came the dull thud of an explosion, followed by the faint sound of cheering.

  ‘Grenade.’ Rudi’s voice was worried. ‘It don’t seem right —’

  ‘We’ve no choice,’ Franz told him. ‘Come on.’

  He turned and ran to the other end of the building. On this side was the town square with its statue and church facade. From a wall posters invited Frenchmen to volunteer for the Waffen SS.

  I wonder if they’re allowed to have fillings in their teeth, Franz thought. I doubt they’re so fussy these days.

  They checked the streets leading off the other side of the square but as far as they could tell the rest of the town was quiet.

  ‘Let’s get back inside and tell our heroic captain the good news,’ Franz said.

  ‘A dozen at the school, you say?’ Above his tight collar Scholz’s face shone with sweat.

  ‘Maybe more.’

  ‘And in the rest of the town?’

  ‘None that we could see.’

  ‘That means nothing. There may be hundreds of them.’

  ‘Sir, with respect, if there were hundreds of them they’d have attacked us before this.’

  ‘What do you suggest we do, then?’

  ‘Take a fighting patrol and drive them away from the school.’

  ‘A dozen men,’ Scholz said. ‘Possibly more. With grenades. And bazookas. That explosion first thing sounded like a bazooka to me.’ It was obvious that Scholz had no stomach for a fight. ‘Negotiation, that’s what we need.’

  ‘They get in here,’ Franz said, ‘they’ll cut our throats.’

  ‘I’m talking about a flag of truce.’

  ‘You know the maquis’ slogan? Bouziller les gars. You know what that means, sir?’

  ‘I don’t speak French.’ Stiffly.

  ‘It means if we give them half a chance they’ll kill the lot of us.’

  ‘We have the prisoners,’ Scholz said. ‘We can use them to bargain with.’

  ‘What happens when we’ve handed them over? Do you really think we can trust them?’

  Scholz wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He looked as though he might burst into tears. ‘What do we do, then?’

  ‘Sir, we must get out there and deal with them. If we once let them think they can attack us without our fighting back —’

  Scholz threw up his hands despairingly. ‘Take a platoon, then. See what you can do.’ Belatedly he tried to scrape together some authority. ‘But stay in radio contact, you understand? At all times.’

  Franz picked the best men available. Not that they were that remarkable.

  ‘The flight of the lame ducks,’ Rudi grinned, hobbling himself. ‘What we trying to do? Get them to die laughing?’

  ‘I don’t care how they die,’ Franz said, ‘just so long as they do it.’

  ‘There’s a half-track out the back of the barracks,’ Rudi said. ‘You want to use that?’

  At least it would give them cover if there were snipers.

  They went to the vehicle park. Sure enough, there were two half tracks and one PAK 75 anti-tank gun.

  ‘Any ammunition for this?’

  They found anti-tank and shrapnel shells in the arms store.

  ‘Anyone know how to use it?’

  ‘I used one in Africa,’ Rudi said. ‘But I’ll need someone to give me a hand.’

  ‘I’m putting you in charge of it. You take who you want.’

  ‘Pity we’ve no tanks,’ Rudi said. ‘You could call me Rommel.’

  They limbered the PAK to the half-track and roared out of the barracks and into the town.

  ‘The school first.’ Franz had to yell to make himself heard above the clatter of the tracks.

  They swerved down a side street and came at length to the back of the school. There was a lot of smoke.

  ‘I reckon the bastards have set the place on fire,’ Rudi shouted.

  From the end of the street came a sudden ripple of gun flashes.

  ‘There’s a machine gun down there!’ Franz slammed the driver on the shoulder to make him stop. The engine cut and for the first time they heard the hammer of gunfire. ‘Come on, Rommel,’ Franz said. ‘Catch me a machine gunner.’

  Rudi and his assistant leapt down and unlimbered the PAK, swinging it so that its barrel pointed down the street. They loaded. Rudi squint
ed through the eyepiece.

  ‘Fire!’

  The PAK roared. Crouched in the road behind the half-track, Franz heard the explosion as the round burst against the open shutters of the house. Suddenly the machine gun was silent.

  ‘Keep that up, I really will be calling you Rommel.’ Franz studied the position for a moment, turned to the driver. ‘See that bus shelter? I’ll take the Schmeisser down there, set up a cross-fire. You drive to the corner. Cover me until I’m in position. Then I’ll cover you while you come down the street to clear them out.’

  The men in the half-track looked dubious.

  ‘If we don’t teach them a lesson right now,’ he told them, ‘we’ll all be dead by tonight.’

  Perhaps that would put some steel in their bones. Get them to move now and it would be all right. Hang about even a minute and they would turn to concrete.

  He turned to Horst Geller, one of the least decrepit of the men. ‘Come with me. Bring the Schmeisser.’

  They ran crouching towards the brick bus shelter on the corner of the street. As they ran Franz heard a burst of firing from the front of the school but none of the bullets came anywhere near them.

  Rudi had been right; a corner of the building was on fire.

  They set up the machine gun so that it could enfilade the front of the school. They could not see the maquisards but the muzzle flashes of their weapons showed where they were holed up in the houses on the other side of the street.

  ‘Give them a burst,’ Franz said, ‘see if you can keep their heads down.’

  Horst settled himself behind the gun and opened up. The gun lurched and roared on its bipod. The stench and smoke of cordite blew back around them. Through his binoculars Franz saw fragments of stonework fly from the wall of the nearest house. There was the distant crash of glass as the Schmeisser poured bullets into one of the rooms of a house where they had seen gun flashes. Horst swivelled the gun and fired at the next house and then at the next. The gun stopped.