Fair Stood the Wind for France

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Must we cross it?’ Taylor said.

  ‘We’ll be better away from it, that’s all,’ he said. ‘And away on that side.’

  He slipped his good arm out of his Irwin jacket.

  ‘Somebody take this off,’ he said. ‘Careful.’

  ‘Look,’ O’Connor said, ‘you’re being a bloody fool.’

  ‘You can all swim, can’t you?’

  ‘All except you.’

  ‘I can swim with two fingers.’

  ‘You can’t swim with that arm,’ O’Connor said, ‘and what’s more, you’re not going to.’

  ‘We’ve got to get over.’

  ‘Quite apart from the fact that you can’t move it, the bandage will soak and slip off and be no good. You’ll probably break the wound open again and lose a hell of a sight more blood. It’s tough tit, Frankie, but you can’t do it.’

  He knew all at once that he was being obstinate, and suddenly he did not care.

  ‘All right, what then?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll tow you over,’ O’Connor said.

  He did not answer.

  ‘I swam two rivers in France in 1940,’ O’Connor said. ‘It’s easy, if you do it right. Now you do it in relays, see? You strip and you take your clothes over, a few at a time. It means more swimming but you keep your clothes dry. It’s better than rushing like a bull.’

  Frankie knew that O’Connor was right. ‘O.K., you do it your way,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going over with my clothes on,’ Sandy said.

  ‘Do as you like,’ O’Connor said, ‘but I’m going first.’

  O’Connor took off his flying-jacket and then began to undress. He took the braces off his trousers and then rolled his trousers, shirt, underpants and sweater into his flying-jacket, making a bulky bundle which he finally tied with his braces. ‘You see, you got your boots, too. You can’t swim in your boots. The best way is to swim on your back. Swim with your legs and keep your clothes above water.’

  The edge of the stream was firm and sandy, where the river had risen and receded and river-sand had dried white in the sun. It was almost dark now, but there was a faint light on the sand and a reflection of fainter light on the water. O’Connor, naked and carrying the bundle of clothes, went into the water up to his knees, then crouched and then rolled over. The splash of his going under was muffled like the splash of a water rat. The water was broken for a moment, then smoothed and then broken again as O’Connor turned on his back and began to swim. The three sergeants and Franklin watched him swim across, his upraised arms pale against the black water, his legs always more under the water than out of it, his movements making hardly a sound. He went across slowly and easily, always in sight, and finally they saw him standing on the far bank, just visible in the darkness, and heard his call.

  ‘Piece of cake,’ he said. ‘O.K.’

  ‘The three of you go,’ Franklin said. ‘Keep your boots and socks dry if nothing else. And shout like hell if you can’t make it.’

  Noisier than O’Connor, splashing heavily by the bank, so that Franklin felt momentarily nervous, the three sergeants swam the river. Alone on the bank, watching them, Franklin took off his boots. It was awkward with one arm; he felt lop-sided. And now, for the first time that night, his arm was painful again. He could feel the cut made by the tourniquet as if it were a second wound. He tried to buckle the flying-boots together, but with one hand it was no use, and he felt a fool and realized how helpless he was. As he crouched on the bank waiting for O’Connor, he caught the odour of water-mint, strong and astringent, crushed by somebody’s feet on the river edge. Then he heard O’Connor’s flop into the water on the far side and saw the white break of his arms in the black water as they made the natural strokes. He slipped down his trousers and undid his shirt. He tried to pull the shirt over his head, but the blood had come through the bandage, sticking one to the other. He decided to wait for O’Connor. And while he waited, watching O’Connor coming across the stream, he felt the oddity of the moment less than any potential peril. He felt comic and lonely and awkward standing there in his shirt.

  O’Connor, breathing hard, came out of the river, wiping his face and hair with his hands.

  ‘O.K.?’ Franklin said.

  ‘Lovely. I feel a man and a half. Fit?’

  ‘Not quite. My shirt’s sticking to the bandage. I can’t get it over my head.’

  ‘Hold hard,’ O’Connor said. ‘Can you straighten your arm?’

  He tried to straighten his arm; the elbow joint seemed locked and would not move. The skin of all his arm seemed tight, as if, when he bent it, the wound must split again. A wave of cold weakness, more than pain, came up from his feet and washed over his whole body.

  ‘I’m not surprised you can’t bend it,’ O’Connor said. ‘Hold on.’

  He began to rip the shirt up from the cuff. He peeled it off from the dried blood of the bandage and it came away crackling and dry like paper ripped from a wall. When finally it was free, O’Connor pulled the shirt over Franklin’s head.

  Franklin heard a sound. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s Sandy. He’s coming to fetch the boots. In five minutes we’ll be clear.’

  ‘I think it’s best like this, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Better than trying a bridge.’

  ‘Better? I’m just in my bloody element,’ O’Connor said.

  They waited for Sandy to come over, and while they waited O’Connor tied Franklin’s things into a bundle, and then buckled the boots, two pairs, together. Sandy had swum across without his flying-jacket. He stood on the bank, jumping up and down, blowing water, and wiping his hair. As they stood there, the three of them, waiting for the moment to go, Franklin felt keenly, more even than at any moment when flying, their interdependence, profound and clear and inexpressibly tense, and the trust he had in them.

  The moment was broken by O’Connor’s voice. ‘Sit in the bloody water,’ he said.

  ‘Sit in it?’

  ‘Squat down. Haven’t you ever been baptized?’

  ‘I’m C. of E.,’ he said.

  ‘You are? Well, now you’re going to see how the Baptists do it.’

  He went down into the water, gripping the sloping sand with his feet. It was cold and the shock surged up into his throat. He crouched down, holding the bundle of his clothes against his chest, high under his chin. ‘Don’t do a damn thing,’ O’Connor said, ‘except just lie still.’ A moment later he felt O’Connor pull him backwards into the water. He had for one second a spasm of panic, but he held all of himself tight against it, holding his breath, and then he felt O’Connor’s hand under his chin. A moment later he felt the motion of O’Connor swimming, and held his wounded arm up in the air and the clothes tight against his chest with the other arm, and he felt the water going past him, smooth and cold and easy. He came to accept this motion, and the sure buoyancy of his own body, so much that he became aware, in the last minute of crossing, of something else. The great glow of moonlight was spreading fast in the east, the moon still invisible but the light expanding, pale orange, all over the sky above the river. And in the last moments of going across the river he saw the moon bursting like ripe orange fruit beyond the black straight clumps of distant poplars far upstream. It rode smoothly up into view at the moment he himself sailed smoothly into the bank, drawn right up into the sharp dry sand like a boat by O’Connor’s arms.

  ‘Get your arm wet?’ O’Connor said.

  ‘No, I’m O.K., I think. Thanks,’ he said. He remembered suddenly the rations, the maps, the first-aid kit. He asked if anyone brought them.

  ‘Sandy brought them the first time,’ Taylor said.

  ‘Is Sandy O.K.?’

  ‘Just coming into port,’ Godwin said.

  ‘All right’ he said. ‘Goddy, get the rum and get a tot for everybody.’

  Sandy came up the bank, blowing water again. The moon was coming up fast, the red quarter deepening beyond the far black trees, the glow spreading across the sky and
gradually down now, liquid and pure, on the smooth dark water. The three flying-jackets and the white figures of himself and O’Connor began to seem very conspicuous as they stood there, and he felt now that it was dangerous to be waiting.

  ‘We’ve got to get on,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll rub you down,’ O’Connor said. ‘How’s your arm?’

  ‘Rub O’Connor down,’ he said to Taylor. ‘The arm’s as right as rain.’

  ‘At home you’d be in hospital,’ O’Connor said.

  ‘Don’t talk cock,’ he said.

  Five minutes later they began to move away, the three sergeants ahead as before. In the water and before dressing, Franklin had felt cold. Now, after the rum and with his body dry again, he felt warm and light and buoyant, as if he could walk for miles. His arm did not pain him much except for the dull ache of the stiffness, and it was always warm against the inner wool of his flying-jacket.

  He did not remember much else about that night except their walking on, in what he knew, by the rising moon, was a roughly westward direction. He remembered the moon always very white in the clear summer night sky, and the same crops repeating themselves, roots and corn and potatoes and sometimes a slope of vines, over the successive folds of the bright land. He remembered a small road and how they crossed it into the same repeated pattern of fields, and how he was alternately glad and uneasy about the moon, so clear that he could see the colour of a few late potato flowers in one field as they passed and the brown of the three flying-jackets always half a field away.

  They came at last to a place, a slight hill, where the three sergeants had stopped and waited for them. The sergeants were out of the moonlight, near a group of beeches.

  ‘Look down there,’ Sandy said.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  Looking down into the valley, where divisions of many fields were stencilled dark against the flat whiteness of moon-white land, he saw the river, broader now and bright as chromium between the dark banks of reeds, curving in a deep arc below the hill.

  ‘See the house?’ Sandy said.

  ‘Yes.’ He could see a house, tall and squarish, dustily white in the moonlight on the curve of the river, down below his right hand. Nearer, up the slope, he could see a little orchard and then a strip of vines, about ten rows deep, across the middle of the hill. ‘It’s a mill,’ he said.

  ‘What do we do?’ Sandy said.

  ‘Another swim,’ O’Connor said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll get down in the vines for the night. We’ll get cover there, and some more grapes, and a rest, and then in the morning I’ll go down.’

  ‘To the house?’ Godwin said.

  ‘We’ve got to get help,’ he said.

  They walked down the slope, keeping close together, until they came to the vines. They broke off a few clusters of grapes and sat in the shadows of the terraces, eating them. They lay among the vines for the rest of the night. The moon went down across the broad flat land below them, and in the early morning the coldness came up from the river, settling on the slope with dew.

  It must have been about six o’clock when Franklin looked down and saw a black flutter of hens on the grass about the fruit trees, and then the white apron of a girl as she followed them. She was about three hundred yards away, below the vines, but he could see quite clearly the black of her hair above the white apron, and the wide motion of her brown arm, as she threw, from a brown bowl, the food to the hens. He could hear her voice, too, as she called them, spasmodically, repeating the call in the high, clipped, imperative French way. Then he saw the hens feeding, their red-black heads hammering the grass, and then the girl walking a few steps up the slope, her head up towards the sun, as if she had just got up and were breathing in the day.

  ‘I’m going down,’ he said. ‘If I don’t come back you know what to do.’

  He went boldly out of the vines without another word, and down the sharp dry path that went through the fruit trees to where the girl stood. The blood was pumping heavily into his chest with the excitement of the moment. He walked fast, thinking, ‘This is it. One way or the other, this is it.’ His arm was aching and his mouth was very dry, and he thought, ‘Give me a dozen Bremen trips before this. Anything before this. Christ, if only she doesn’t run.’

  She did not run. She went on idly standing among the hens, her head up, as she still looked at the rising day.

  And then suddenly she saw him coming down.

  CHAPTER 4

  SHE did not move. She held the smooth brown wooden bowl with both hands, tight against her body, just under her breast, crinkling the pinafore into shadow. She was very dark, and her eyes, big and bright and black, did not move either. She held them level against the sun.

  ‘I’m English,’ he said.

  Once again it was all he could remember to say. Once again it seemed very foolish and pantomimic: not at all what he had wanted to say. She did not speak, and he was struck in an extraordinary way by her silence and her motionlessness. There was nothing passive about them. They were strong and definite and he knew that she was not afraid.

  ‘Can you help, please?’ he said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Only you?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. There are five of us.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the vines.’ He waved his hand towards the hill.

  ‘I wondered why the dog cried in the night,’ she said.

  She said it quite calmly, as if she had always expected it. She did not even look up the hill. She clasped the bowl tight to her chest and kept her eyes levelly fixed at him.

  ‘You had better call them down,’ she said.

  ‘It is all right?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is all right.’

  He knew the four sergeants were watching from the vines. He turned and waved his hand, not shouting, and in a second or two he saw the four flying-jackets on the path coming down from the terraces.

  ‘Is this Occupied territory?’ he said to the girl.

  ‘It is Occupied,’ she said. ‘Are you glad?’

  ‘I’m very glad.’

  ‘Have you heard about us?’

  ‘A lot.’

  Then I’m glad, too,’ she said.

  ‘And where is this?’ he said.

  ‘This? It is in Occupied France.’

  ‘Yes, but what place?’

  ‘Your friends are coming,’ she said.

  The four sergeants came down past the fruit trees to where Franklin and the girl were standing. ‘Bonjour,’ O’Connor said. The girl smiled. O’Connor grinned and Franklin saw the four of them as a stranger might see them, tired-eyed and unshaven and embarrassed, and he said, ‘It’s all right. It’s O.K.’

  ‘You had better come in,’ the girl said.

  Franklin began to walk ahead with her down the slope, towards the mill. The path widened and became a stone-slabbed cartway that went between the big stone mill on the right-hand side and the house, also of stone, but smaller, on the left. He could just see the cartway going on towards the river and opening out still further there into a stone jetty. The river was calm and low beyond. He could hear the water rushing down with an ascending and powerful sound in the sluice somewhere on the other side of the mill and he could smell the old smell of water and the smell of sun-dried water-weed on stone, strong as seaweed in the sun, and then the summery smell of corn-dust, dry in the cool air of the still morning. As the girl went a few paces ahead of him over the threshold of the kitchen he saw her legs bare and brown in the sun. They were slim and strong and the brownness was smooth and a little deeper than the natural sallow of the skin of someone very dark, and her neck had the same beautiful brownness below the short black hair.

  The five of them followed her into the kitchen. It was very big. Copper utensils shone on the whitewashed wall above the fire, and he smelt the old but not stale odour of cooking, and saw, at a long central wooden table, an old woman in black cutting a stick of bread.

>   ‘My God, my God,’ she said. She stood up.

  ‘Where is father?’ the girl said.

  ‘My God. English? Upstairs.’

  ‘Fetch him down.’

  As the old woman went out of the room, excitedly, the girl turned to Franklin, calm as before.

  ‘You’d better take off your flying-jackets,’ she said, ‘and give them to me.’

  ‘I want to show you my papers,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She wants your jackets,’ he said.

  He took out his wallet from his hip pocket with his good arm and flapped it open. His pass was inside, but with only one arm to use it was hard to get it out. The girl stood watching him, looking at the bandaged arm. He was very afraid she would try to help him, but she did not move, and suddenly he realized that she was not helping because she knew, quite calmly and quite surely, that he felt like that. Finally he laid the wallet on the table and held it down with his thumb while he pulled out the pass with two fingers. She was calm and serious as he gave her the pass to see.

  ‘What were you flying?’ she said.

  ‘A Wellington. We had been to Italy.’

  ‘Did you jump?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I brought the aircraft down.’

  ‘What kind of country was it?’

  He told her about the marsh and the forest and then the river, and how the five of them had walked for some part of a day.

  ‘Where are we now? ’ he said.

  ‘This is the same river you crossed,’ she said.

  He knew suddenly that she was not going to tell him where they were and that perhaps she never would tell him, and he knew now that it was the right thing.

  ‘Are you the captain?’ she said. ‘Or is it just that you speak French?’

  ‘I’m the captain,’ he said.

  ‘What about your arm?’ She spoke of it for the first time.

  ‘I hurt it when we crashed.’

  ‘You lost a lot of blood?’ she said.

  ‘A little,’ he said.

  ‘It will have to be properly dressed,’ she said.

  The four sergeants had taken off their flying-jackets and laid them on the long wooden table. Franklin had begun to undo his own when the father came into the room. He was followed by the old woman, who gathered up the flying-jackets in her arms and went out again. Then the father came over and stood by the girl, and Franklin said ‘Good morning’. The man was tall and thin, with dark hair, and the same sallow skin as the girl, and with deep fissures, like cuts, below his high brown cheek-bones. He held out his hand and Franklin took it and shook hands.