Escape by Moonlight

by Mary Nichols

  ‘He wasn’t sure if there were any British troops left in France and he hadn’t known there’d been an armistice, so he dragged himself back. God knows how he made it, but there he was in the middle of Paris, hungry, thirsty and exhausted with a nasty gash in his leg. He’d put a field dressing on it, but that was filthy.’

  ‘And you looked after him. Thank you, Justine.’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice, did I?’ she said with a chuckle. ‘But I was glad to do it. De Gaulle says we must fight on and if helping people in danger is the only way we can do it, so be it. I’d do it for anyone in a similar situation.’ General De Gaulle had escaped to England and was urging everyone not to give up, that they should continue the fight in whatever way they could, wherever they were. ‘Whatever happens,’ he had said in a broadcast to the French people from London, ‘the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘I’m going to see Max safely over the Swiss border so he can make his way home, then I’m off back to Paris.’

  ‘You’re not staying here in the Zone Libre, then?’

  ‘Free, you call it?’ Justine laughed again. ‘It might not be quite so manacled as the occupied zone, but believe me, it’s far from free. Pétain is pulling the wool over your eyes if you believe that.’

  ‘No, I don’t believe it.’

  ‘You could go back with Max.’

  ‘No, I’m staying put, but I’ll go as far as the border with you and see Max safely over. Do you think he’s up to the climb?’

  ‘He says he is. We’ll see how he is in the morning. Let’s go to sleep.’

  It was a long while before Elizabeth slept. She had been shocked by Max’s appearance and the dreadful story of prisoners being shot. It was something she had never thought of, let alone considered possible. How thankful she was that Max had escaped and that he had thought of Justine. She would send him home with loving messages to her family.

  Max came out to the yard next morning just as she was driving the cows in to be milked. He looked better after a good night’s sleep. He kissed her lightly and then stood leaning against the cowshed door while she did the milking.

  ‘I gather from Justine you’ve had a pretty bad time of it,’ she said, her head in the side of one of the cows, her hands moving rhythmically on the udders.

  ‘Yes, though others have fared worse. They shot my men in cold blood, every single one of them. What am I to tell their families? How am I to explain how I survived and they didn’t?’

  ‘I don’t know, Max, but I suppose the truth is always best. It was a fluke that you survived, not anything to be ashamed of. You were wounded, after all.’

  ‘A mere flea bite.’

  ‘That’s not what Justine says. She told me you had walked all the way to Paris with a festering leg.’

  He laughed. ‘“Hobbled” would be a more accurate word, but I didn’t have any choice. It is the duty of every man to escape and I could not think of any other way to do it. A few people I met gave me food and drink but none wanted to risk harbouring me. In any case I was bent on finding our own lines. I had no idea France had fallen. It was a shock to find all those Nazi flags flying in Paris. Thank goodness for Justine’s courage. She risked her life to help me.’

  ‘She says she is going to take you over the border into Switzerland.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It will be patrolled by the Vichy police. Whether they’ll turn a blind eye is debatable.’

  ‘We aren’t going to risk it. Justine says she knows a route we can use; she used to climb there when she was a young girl. It’s hard going but safer.’

  ‘Will you manage it?’

  ‘I’ll have to, won’t I? Come too.’

  She could not deny she was tempted. To be safe at home with Mama and Papa and Amy and the boys seemed like a distant dream. She sighed and put it from her. ‘No, my duty is here, just as it’s yours to go back, but I’ll come to the border with you.’

  Justine was right; it was a hard climb once they left the meadows behind, plodded through the forest and then out onto the peaks. Justine went ahead, leaving Max and Elizabeth to walk together. Occasionally he stumbled and she put out a hand to steady him. She was glad it was summer and the snow gone; she doubted if he could have managed it in winter.

  ‘You know where to go when you get over the border?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes, Justine has given me instructions.’ He paused. ‘We might not see each other again for a very long time.’

  ‘Oh, you never know. The war might be over in no time.’

  They had been plodding steadily upwards, but now the slope flattened out and then they were looking down, and below them a mountain path snaked through the hills. Justine stopped and pointed. ‘Switzerland, Max.’

  Max and Elizabeth stood close together, his arm about her, apparently watching the path. A few goats had strayed onto it and above them a buzzard hovered. She looked up into his face. ‘You’ll be all right?’

  ‘Of course. All I have to do is scramble down there and walk along the path until I come to the road, and strike out along that until I come to Les Crosets where I tell them who I am. Simple.’ He paused, then added quietly, ‘Come with me, Liz.’

  ‘No. My grandparents need me. I’ll be all right. We’re in the unoccupied zone, after all. Don’t worry about me.’

  Justine had gone a little way from them and was examining the path through binoculars, leaving them a little privacy to say goodbye, but she was on her way back to them. Elizabeth turned to put her arms about his waist and looked up into his face. ‘Take care of yourself, Max. I’ll be thinking of you. If you can, let us know you’ve got safely back. Give my parents my letter and assure them I am fit and well and they are not to worry about me.’

  ‘I’ll try. Now I must go.’ He hugged her close and she clung to him. It seemed so final, that goodbye, as if they would never see each other again, a possibility neither of them wanted to face. They stood together, two figures moulded together on what seemed the top of the world. He kissed her, softly at first and then more fervently, then slowly put her from him. ‘Goodbye, sweetheart. God keep you safe until we meet again.’ He turned from her to Justine who had rejoined them. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done, Justine. I shan’t forget it.’ He kissed her cheek and then he was stumbling away from them towards the distant path. They watched him for several minutes then Justine took Elizabeth’s arm. ‘Come, Lisabette, we can do no more for him and we must get back.’

  Reluctantly Elizabeth turned her back on the man making his way down the hill towards freedom and allowed Justine to lead her back to the farm, her vision blurred by tears.

  The next day Justine insisted on returning to Paris in spite of the entreaties of her mother to stay. ‘I may have lost half my pupils,’ she told them. ‘But the other half need educating and I can’t leave my job without notice. Besides, my permit was only for four days and if I overstay they’ll come looking for me. I don’t intend to get into trouble if I can help it.’

  Her job wasn’t the only reason, she later confided when Elizabeth was driving her to the railway station in Annecy. ‘If I can help one man escape, I can help more. There must be dozens of our soldiers, French and British, hiding up, trying to keep out of the hands of the Boche. It will be my way of continuing the fight.’

  ‘Send them to me. I’ll get them over the border.’

  ‘I hoped you’d say that. Not a word to Maman, though, not until it becomes necessary.’

  ‘Did you tell Max?’

  ‘Yes. How the word will get about I don’t know, but he seems to think it will. In the meantime I intend to be a good teacher, looking after my pupils, minding my own business and doing everything our conquerors expect of us. I will give them no cause for complaint.’

  Compared to the suffocating crowds on the southbound trains, those going north were practically empty. They said their goodbyes, then Elizabeth drove back to Dransvi
lle. The little van was almost out of petrol and she didn’t know when they would be able to get any more. But she had been uplifted by Justine’s visit and the short but sweet reunion with Max. If there were more men like him on the run, then she would do all she could to help them. She started to sing: ‘We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day …’ She had to stop because her tears were choking her.

  Chapter Six

  The Battle for France was over, the Battle for Britain had yet to begin. Everywhere defences were being strengthened, pillboxes built, beaches mined, sandbags put up over doors and windows, blackout enforced to the point of being silly and often dangerous. Anyone who showed a chink of light from a window after dark was liable to have an air-raid warden knock on their door and tell them curtly, ‘Put that light out.’ Even lighting a cigarette out of doors was supposed to help guide the enemy. And the number of pedestrians hurt by cars and buses with their headlights blacked out was worrying. Rules were relaxed to allow headlights to have narrow slits so drivers could see and be seen. The faint blue light allowed in the trains after dark turned everyone’s features a ghostly hue and was useless for reading purposes.

  Factories were working round the clock producing guns, aeroplanes, tanks and ammunition which were transported in long freight trains. Shipyards were turning out ships as fast as they could, but the shipping losses continued and the country was also desperately short of aeroplanes. Jack, circling above the fields of southern England, smiled to himself to think of the piles of metal in Nayton school playground, duplicated at almost every school in the country. It was next to useless and the whole idea had been a propaganda exercise. It was annoying to think that Nayton Manor had lost its intricate wrought iron gates. It would cost the earth to have them replaced.

  His father had been philosophical about it, shrugging his shoulders and saying, ‘It’s war, Jack. Can’t be helped.’ And then he’d gone off to train his part-time troops, now called the Home Guard. They had recently been issued with uniforms and rifles and spent their time tramping over the fields and flinging themselves down to fire at unseen targets. They dug defensive ditches and practised throwing grenades at imaginary tanks. They ranged in age from the very young to the very old, those not physically fit enough for the armed forces and those, like Frank Lambert, who were in reserved occupations. Bernard who wanted desperately to join them, was allowed to call himself a messenger, though they wouldn’t give him a uniform or a rifle. He donned his Boy Scout uniform and made himself an armband. They took themselves very seriously, which amused Jack.

  ‘You won’t laugh if we’re invaded,’ his father had told him. ‘I doubt the RAF would be able to stop it.’

  ‘We’d have a damn good try.’

  Since the evacuation of Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe had concentrated on attacking shipping in the Channel and occasional bombing sorties over the mainland to test the country’s defences. Jack was well aware that he and his fellow pilots were a large part of that defence. It was their job to shoot down the bombers before they could reach their targets without being shot down themselves. This task was made doubly difficult when the airfields of southern England became the enemy’s main target.

  Only the day before they had been scrambled to intercept a raid of hundreds of German bombers, supported by fighters. The trepidation he had felt, the nerves which stirred his stomach into knots before take-off, disappeared as soon as he was airborne and had a job to do. He had climbed and swirled about the cloudless sky, leaving vapour trails and puffs of smoke as he dived in, guns blazing, to claim a Messerschmitt. Jubilant, he had returned to base to find a scene of such devastation it sobered him at once. The administration buildings were badly damaged and still smoking. One of the gun emplacements had had a direct hit and was nothing but a hole in the ground and shattered metal. He only just managed to avoid a huge crater in the runway as he came down to land.

  Luckily most of the aircraft had been airborne at the time of the raid, but those left on the ground would never fly again and there had been casualties among the ground crew and WAAFs who worked in the offices, stores and in the operations room. He had gone to a makeshift hut to be debriefed and then taken what rest he could before the enemy returned, which they did to every airfield they could reach, over and over again. This was air warfare with a vengeance. Over that beautiful summer he lost several good friends. How he managed to survive himself was down to luck, he supposed. Every spare minute off the base was precious. Depending how long he had he would go with his pals to the pub or home for a few days, and occasionally he would go and see Lucy.

  She was always pleased to see him and she had a sort of sixth sense about whether he wanted to talk or not. If his head was full of what he had been doing and he needed to talk, she let him ramble on without interrupting. If he wanted to be quiet, she sat beside him, her head on his shoulder, in a sort of silent companionship that didn’t need words. Sometimes they went to bed. By September, her pregnancy was beginning to show and he would lie and stroke her firm round stomach and feel the baby kick. He was still unsure how he felt about fatherhood and had certainly said nothing to his family about it. They did not know about Lucy.

  Sometimes when he and Amy were at home at the same time, she teased him about girlfriends, but he would answer vaguely that he had hundreds of them and which one did she mean? Sometimes, in his more serious moments, he told her that he didn’t think it was right to commit oneself to anyone when life was so precarious. Besides, he thought telling anyone about his relationship with Lucy would spoil it, make it cheap and nasty, when it was nothing of the sort. Lucy understood that. He would return to the station refreshed and ready for the next battle.

  The time had come when they were almost beaten. The shortage of aircraft was critical and the shortage of men to fly them even more so. Pilots were grey with fatigue and ground crews were working against the clock to have the aircraft ready to take off as soon as another alert was sounded. One warm day, early in September, those of his squadron on call were sitting outside the assembly hut on deckchairs, reading or catching up on lost sleep, waiting for the telephone to ring and their squadron leader to shout ‘Scramble!’. It was eerily quiet. The sun shone and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Where was Jerry? It was perfect weather for bombing. They found out the next day. The Luftwaffe turned on London.

  It was a beautiful afternoon, the sky was blue and the trees in London parks afforded a welcome shade from the unseasonably high temperature. There were people about, civilians as well as those in uniform of one sort or another, going about their business, among them Captain Max Coburn, newly arrived in England, making his way to Liverpool Street station to catch a train to report to his regimental headquarters in Norwich after an extensive debriefing by Intelligence. He didn’t pay any particular attention to the siren, presuming it presaged a raid on the airfields close to the capital and so he continued on his way to the underground.

  It was then he became aware of the drone of aircraft and people in the street running for shelter, many of them pushing past him to go down into the safety of the underground. The noise made him stop and look up at the sky. There were so many aircraft he gave up trying to count them and it was obvious they were making for the docks. As he stood there he saw the bombs falling, and even though he was some distance away, he could hear the dull thud of explosions and saw the huge clouds of smoke and, very soon, flames reaching high into the sky. He forgot about his own safety, as he watched.

  ‘I should take shelter, if I were you, sir,’ he was advised by a man in a navy uniform wearing a tin hat and an armband both inscribed with the letters ARP. ‘No sense in taking unnecessary risks.’

  The voice brought him out of his reverie and he hastened to the shelter pointed out to him, where he settled down with others to wait for the all-clear, while he mused on how he had arrived where he was.

  He had made his way into Switzerland after leaving Lizzie and
Justine, though by the time he had found someone to help him, he was dropping with exhaustion. The long walk dragging himself from the Belgium border to Paris with a painful gash in his leg had taken its toll and finding his way over the mountains had nearly finished him. Justine knew how bad it was, though he had kept it from Lizzie. He thanked God for Justine because, without her, he would have died. He had been at his last gasp when he knocked on her door. She had fetched a sympathetic doctor, let him rest and fed him with her own rations. He had known he could not stay with her; it was far too risky and so, as soon as he felt he could walk, she had obtained cartes de travail for them both and they had taken a train to Annecy where they took a cab to Dransville. ‘I can get you across the border into Switzerland from there,’ she had told him. ‘After that it will be up to you.’

  The Swiss authorities had been suspicious at first and it was not until after a prolonged interrogation and several telephone calls to England that they accepted that he was who he said he was. They sent him to hospital in Geneva where he stayed a month having his wound cleaned and dressed and being given physiotherapy to strengthen the damaged muscle. Then they arranged for him to go on a passenger flight to Lisbon where he reported to the British Embassy. After interminable red tape and waiting about, he had been flown back to England, arriving in September just as the Battle of Britain was ending.

  It wasn’t until everyone started to leave the shelter he realised the all-clear had sounded. He emerged to stand with everyone else looking towards the river. Above the rooftops, the sky was red with flames. In the street around them fire engines, their bells clanging, raced past, followed by ambulances.