The Way Ahead

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘Go away, do you hear, you rabble-rouser!’

  The train steamed on towards the Department of Marne, noted for its champagne vineyards and pine forests.

  A certain section of the railway line in the east of Marne was cut through a deeply wooded area, and the foremost pine trees on either side of the track stood like towering sentinels. Trains, travelling at reduced speed, entered this wooded stretch from around a long bend.

  The pine forest was usually quiet except for the snuffles and rustles of foraging wild life. It was not so quiet this afternoon, for an invasion by humans had caused the wild life to retreat noisily into the heart of their habitat, and the invasion itself had been a scrambling and disturbing affair. However, after the invaders, a number of men and women, had settled down, a comparative silence ensued. Now and again, whispers were heard.

  After quite some time, one man addressed another in a murmur.

  ‘Twenty-five minutes, I think, if it left on time, Roget.’

  ‘It always leaves on time,’ whispered Roget, leader of Marne’s main Resistance group. Dark, bristly of jaw, Roget was a man of courage and fixed loyalties. Under no circumstances would he betray France or his comrades. He was a man Bobby and Helene had come to like and admire. ‘That is the way of Germans. They make a fetish of punctuality and paperwork. How are your nerves, eh, Maurice?’

  ‘Critical,’ said Bobby. ‘I need to see a doctor.’

  ‘We’re all in need, we’re all crazy,’ said Roget, ‘but who is sane in a Europe governed by a criminal lunatic?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Bobby, ‘I’m an innocent abroad.’

  ‘You’re no innocent, my friend,’ said Roget.

  ‘I was once,’ said Bobby.

  ‘So were we all at the age of five,’ said Roget.

  On the other side of Bobby, Helene dug an elbow into his ribs.

  ‘If you must talk, talk to me,’ she breathed.

  ‘Don’t worry, Lynette,’ murmured Bobby, ‘I know you’re with me.’

  Roget grinned.

  ‘Your tigress is awake, Maurice,’ he said.

  ‘And spitting,’ said Helene, always in a fierce mood when girding herself for a brush with Hitler’s Nazi Boches. She hated them for what they had done to France, reducing it to humiliation and turning it into a nation bitterly divided.

  Today, another hold-up had been planned. This time a train was their target, the objective the release of its passengers. Helene was keyed up. Bobby had implied he was too, but she knew him and his ability to control his nerves and concentrate on the need for action at the right time. Ah, that English blood of his, it never rushed hot through his veins, it flowed like the sluggish Thames. Well, perhaps not all the time. There were the occasions when he was as hot-blooded as she could wish for. As for the Thames, she would like to see it again, from a place called Marlow, where Bobby had once taken her on a summer day. There the river was clear and running, the banks green, the gardens of houses sloping down to the waters, where ducks and drakes glided, flapped and dipped. The sun dappled the swirling currents and produced moving fingers of light on the surface. Bobby had taken her rowing in a rented boat, and they had laughed the afternoon away.

  He was a crazy man, her Bobby, doing the most reckless things with never a shout or a tremor. The men and women of the Resistance liked him, and one or two of the women would have endeavoured to make love with him if she had not threatened to cut their throats.

  ‘Hands off, you peasants.’

  ‘But we don’t ask for each other alone, we’re willing to share.’

  ‘Share? Share? How would you like your filthy tongue pulled out?’

  ‘Lynette, we aren’t playing a game with the repulsive Nazis. We belong, as you do, to those who may be alive today and dead by torture tomorrow. What is the point of acting as if little things are important?’

  ‘Little things?’

  ‘Jealousy. Possessiveness. And even love.’

  ‘Love is a little thing, you moth-eaten donkey?’

  ‘Cheating Hitler and avoidance of death are the only things of real importance at present. Love is for the future, if France has a future.’

  ‘Stupid woman, you know nothing of love.’

  Helene ground her teeth at her recollections. Beside her, Bobby was quite still. He was probably trying to estimate the number of running footsteps it would take him to reach the track. His strength was his single-mindedness. All through the days he had spent on her parents’ farm following the Dunkirk evacuation, his unalterable objective had been his homeland. He had made up his mind from the beginning that the only way to get there was by sailing the Channel. That fixed purpose wore her down, and so in the end she set sail with him in her own boat that had miraculously survived the bombing of Dunkirk. Quite crazy, and only the arrival of an MTB boat saved them when her dinghy capsized.

  The forest was still. Not a breath of wind disturbed any part of it. Roget had split his group, some lying in wait on this side of the track, the rest opposite. Everyone was down on one knee within the shelter of the foremost pines. It was easier that way to spring into action. And everyone was armed with a British Sten gun, provided by London and brought over by the SOE agents known to the group only by their code names of Lynette and Maurice.

  Helene whispered into Bobby’s ear.

  ‘Be careful. If you behave like a man running happily into a warm sea, I will knock you to the ground for your own good.’

  ‘And if I break a leg, that’ll be good?’ murmured Bobby, watching the track through the trees.

  ‘Idiot. Where are your emotions?’

  ‘Tucked away under my shirt.’

  Helene, always instantly changeable, wanted to shriek with laughter. Instead, she whispered, ‘Ah, I like what is under your shirt.’

  ‘You French saucebox, stop saying things like that.’

  ‘What is Lynette whispering about now?’ asked Roget.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Bobby, ‘she’s a woman, and I can’t understand any of them. I’ll go through life trying to work out how they tick.’

  An elbow hit him in his ribs again.

  Roget glanced at his wristwatch.

  ‘Tell her, Maurice, that there’s to be no more talking or whispering. Only listening and watching.’

  ‘I hear you, Roget,’ said Helene.

  Roget issued a low whistle, and complete silence descended on the two groups lying in wait, the railway lines between them. Roget had control of a detonating plunger. The cable ran along way down the track to the clamped explosive laid there by Lynette and Maurice, the experts who had been trained in England, and who, Roget had quickly noticed, were inseparable. God help the other if one fell into the hands of the Gestapo. Both would suffer, one from torture, the other from unbearable thoughts. That was the trouble with such relationships when what was called for permitted of nothing except dedication to the cause of stricken France. Lovers should not work together as agents, but one could not help accepting the partnership of Lynette and Maurice, resolute, quick-thinking and experienced agents, and it was Roget’s understanding that their entry into the SOE had been conditional on operating as a team.

  He had agreed with them that the reduced speed of the train as it entered the straight stretch from the bend would enable it to pull up well before it reached the buckled lines. It would not do for engine and coaches to be wrecked. Attending to casualties was not the purpose of the exercise at all.

  It should not be long now before the train was heard and seen, no more than ten to fifteen minutes. Every ear was straining and listening.

  What every ear heard then was not the sound of an approaching train, but of a vibrating hum in the sky, a hum that quickly turned into a loud and recognizable drone.

  ‘Bombers,’ murmured Roget.

  ‘Flying Fortresses?’ said Bobby. ‘Another American daylight raid on Germany?’

  The planes were high, invisible, but the drone was heavy and unmistakably that of
bombers.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Roget, ‘but watch, Maurice, watch. In this noise we’ll hear nothing of the train.’

  The blue sky gave birth to streaks of white as French-based German fighters shot upwards in pursuit of the raiders, the first flight of which was now overhead, but still too high to be seen. The drone continued as other flights followed the first.

  Again Roget looked at his watch.

  ‘How long now?’ asked Bobby.

  ‘Six minutes,’ said Roget.

  His partisans watched while the reaches of the sky filled with the drone of giant bombers.

  Something caught Helene’s eye. She glanced down. A large stag beetle was climbing over the toe of her right boot. In the way of its kind, its movements were erratic. It slipped, it clung, it scrambled and darted. Little crab, thought Helene, why don’t you go round my boot instead of climbing it? The beetle went gamely on, reached the curve of a precipice and fell into crushed brown pine needles, where it happily righted itself and went walking. Au revoir, my friend, I hope we shall succeed in our endeavours as well as you have in yours.

  The droning died, and the sky above returned to quiet. Roget heard the train then, two minutes only behind the estimated time. He lightly touched Bobby’s arm. Bobby nodded, and Roget issued another whistle.

  Tension took hold of every man and woman comprising the ambuscade. The sound of the train’s approach became clear, its speed governed by the demands of the long curving bend. Roget, hand on the plunger, rammed it down hard and fast the moment the engine came into view. Away down the line the explosive, detonated, went up with a crack and a roar. Twisted steel leapt, sleepers were torn from their beds, stone chips spouted, and the whole seemed to turn into a whirligig of disintegrating matter for the space of a few seconds. The train ran on unchecked for a moment or two before a German Army corporal, riding with the driver and fireman, yelled in frantic alarm. Sparks flew and metal shrieked as brakes clamped on wheels, and wheels grated on steel. The train shuddered and lurched, its weight forcing it on. The engine passed the place of ambush, coaches passed, and windows passed, windows that framed pictures of passengers thrown about. It took the train time to come to a noisy, suffering halt, and directly in front of Roget and his group was a flat car coupled at the centre, four coaches ahead of it and four behind it, with the guard’s van. On the flat car were six German soldiers and two mounted machine-guns, one on each side. The soldiers were an untidy heap, erupting into shouts as they struggled to right themselves.

  From either side of the track, from the fringes of the split forest, Sten guns opened up, all trained on the flat car. The fusillade of fire caused the Germans to stay down and to duck their heads low. Bobby and two other men, under covering fire, broke out of the forest, pulled the pins from grenades and lobbed them. Two struck the rail beneath the car, and the third hit a wheel. All three exploded. The car, despite its enormous weight, shuddered, clanged and danced, rolling the Germans about. The mounted machine-guns keeled over.

  Roget’s partisans leapt from concealment on both sides of the track, and rushed forward. By the time the stunned Germans righted themselves they were under the threat of Sten guns, their sergeant swearing at the top of his voice. At the guard’s van, Bobby, Helene and a Resistance man were outside the open door, which had slid back to reveal two Gestapo officers with Aryan good looks. The unpleasantness of finding themselves confronted by an armed trio turned their good looks ugly. Mouths tightened, eyes reflected fury and disgust.

  ‘So sorry,’ said Bobby in French, ‘but stay where you are.’

  On the flat car, the German sergeant was beside himself with rage. Insurgents lined both sides of the shallow embankment. Yes, insurgents, what else? Every one of them, women included, had a Sten gun and, in his opinion, a repulsive countenance typical of a race of decadent Latins. Curse them, they were a collective ugliness. Swines, all of them, fit only to be hanged.

  The standing engine hissed steam as Roget made himself heard in loud accented German.

  ‘Attention, soldiers of Hitler’s infamous Reich! Come down! Quickly, or we shall fire!’

  ‘Dirty swine!’ shouted the sergeant.

  A woman partisan fired. The brief burst of bullets whistled over the heads of the Germans.

  ‘A warning!’ shouted Roget. ‘Come down!’

  Sergeant Erich Hoenloe, blaspheming, clambered down over the side of the car, his men following. From there, with their sidearms confiscated, they were forced to join the Gestapo officers in the guard’s van. The sliding door was closed, a jemmy jamming it, and the van’s inner door leading to the last coach was attended to by a couple of Resistance men. One thrust the sharp end of a wide iron wedge under the foot of the door, and the other gave it a huge kick. The door, which opened outwards, became firmly jammed. The Resistance men remained there as a precaution. One of the imprisoned Germans made an attempt to open the door. A booted foot clamped hard down against the wedge, rendering the attempt useless.

  The guard’s van became a place of noisy, raging Germans. It was unheard of anywhere in German-occupied France, an attack on a train carrying Jewish people.

  Down at the engine, the German corporal who had been riding with the driver and fireman to ensure they would bring the train to its destination, was now a prisoner of some of Roget’s other men. Arriving at the engine, which had come to a stop only twenty metres from the damaged track, they made short work of keeping the corporal quiet by flooring him, gagging him and tying him up.

  There was time now, a limited amount of time, to do other work. The area was uninhabited, and the nearest vineyards were out of sight, but it was all too probable that somewhere along the line, at a station, a railway official would soon begin to wonder why a special non-stop train had not passed.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  WITH THE TRAIN at a standstill, the passengers, having recovered from a tumbling, were newly bewildered. What had happened to bring the train to an emergency stop? They did not suspect for a moment that it was an attempt to spring them free from the hands of the Gestapo. They did not really think themselves prisoners, although they had been warned it would be unwise of any of them to attempt to leave the train. They pressed faces to windows, for they were unable to get out. All doors were locked, except the sliding doors that enabled them to use the corridors and the toilets. But they could not get through to adjoining coaches.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I heard shots being fired a minute ago.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s happening?’

  ‘Are we being attacked by Communists? What are our German guards doing?’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to know. We were told they would prevent any trouble, that our journey would be safe and uninterrupted.’

  ‘I can’t understand why anyone should attack us, can you?’

  ‘Communists, I tell you. They’re everyone’s enemies. A bomb went off on the line, didn’t it?’

  ‘I heard something. Was it a bomb? I don’t know, I couldn’t say.’

  ‘I can hear frightened children crying in the next compartment. Can anyone see what’s happening?’

  ‘I can only see trees.’

  ‘Let the window down.’

  ‘We were told not to open windows.’

  ‘I’ll open it. Stand aside.’

  Similar confusion and apprehension existed in all compartments, which provoked braver souls into pulling down windows and putting their heads out.

  Roget and several of his band were outside a compartment of the last coach, Roget speaking to people crowding the open window.

  ‘Do you want to go free? Then come out. We have a large truck waiting for the women and children.’

  ‘We can’t come out,’ said a man, ‘the door’s locked.’

  ‘If you’ll all stand back, we’ll blow the lock, or you can climb out through the window,’ said Roget. Other partisans were hurrying alongside the train to speak to other passengers, to tell them escape was poss
ible, and that all who wished to should come out. The Jewish people responded with a babble of words, all indicative of reluctance. Resigned to resettlement, they felt escape would only be temporary, that they would be rounded up again.

  ‘No, we can hide you,’ said Helene to a collection of faces at one window, but expressions suggested an extraordinary lack of enthusiasm. Helene was informed that mothers were afraid of what might happen to their children if escape meant a family would be hunted down and punished. ‘If I were such a mother,’ said Helene, ‘I’d be far more afraid of what might happen to all your children at the end of your journey. Come with us, give yourselves and your children the chance to be free.’

  ‘No, we have accepted resettlement, and guarantees of our welfare have been given.’

  My God, thought Helene, they’re either mad or stupidly deluded.

  Bobby, urgently addressing people in another compartment, became appalled by their obvious wish to be left alone and by their belief that resettlement was a genuine thing. Christ Almighty, he thought, are we risking our necks for people who trust the word of authorities acting for Himmler, their worst enemy? Am I to believe they really don’t want to leave this train? The large truck, acquired at great risk and expense, would take scores of the women and children, but they had to make their minds up quickly, bloody quickly. There was no time for argument or for prolonged debate with parents convinced that resettlement was better for them and their children than a hiding-place.

  ‘Come out, for God’s sake,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t, the door’s locked.’

  ‘The window, man, the window. Climb out. I’ll help. Hand me your children.’

  ‘No, there’s our luggage, anyway, everyone’s luggage, in the guard’s van.’

  A woman, becoming hysterical, brought about a greater reluctance to leave the train. But a young man suddenly shouted.

  ‘We’re fools. Of course we must get out. I for one will.’

  He pushed his way through to the window and levered himself out. Bobby helped him down.

  That impulsive act was repeated elsewhere, by those passengers who had voiced doubts and suspicions. Within minutes, two middle-aged men and their wives, three young men, one young woman and a family of five, had also left the train via windows. That, however, amounted to only fourteen people out of what Himmler would have called a consignment of over three hundred subhumans, including fifty-one children.