The others followed him over and down into the yard on the far side, where they waited, ears straining for the sound of the lorry. They heard it arrive right on time, the driver sounding an insolent toot on his horn as he reached the gates.
Yves gestured the Maquisards forward, leaving Farnham, who had been politely ordered to sit out these next few minutes, to follow the planned sequence of events in his head. At this moment Henri and Jacques would be staring down from the cab of the stolen lorry in their stolen gendarmerie uniforms, demanding entrance. The local gendarme on duty might or might not be fooled, but in either instance he would be cut off from the communications in the guardhouse behind him, which would now be under the control of the first Maquisard team. The second would be looking after the off-duty shift in the barracks, reinforcing a good night’s sleep with rags soaked in chloroform.
The minutes went by, and no shots echoed through the town to signal failure. Instead one of the Maquisards came to collect Farnham, leading him past the guardhouse, with its prone gendarmes, to the storehouse proper, where the loading was already underway. He joined in willingly, carting clothing, footwear and an unexpected haul of blankets out to the waiting lorry. On his last trip he noticed a pair of Maquisards busy at work disabling the lorry and two cars which were parked in the storehouse yard. Inside the guardhouse the phone had already been ripped from the wall.
After about five minutes Yves signalled enough, and all but Henri and Jacques climbed into the back of the vehicle. Henri reversed it out into the road, Jacques pulled the gates shut and climbed back into the cab, and the lorry rumbled off through the sleeping village. A few minutes later they stopped again, this time to pick up the two men who had left the hill ahead of them, but Farnham could see no sign of the woman or her companion.
They were still on a main road, and the faces of the men around him reflected the dangers that represented, but no unexpected road-block appeared in front of them, and there was no sign of pursuit behind. A few minutes later they turned off into a winding lane, and now at last the Maquisards began to relax. There were grins on the faces, the first murmurs of conversation, even a joke or two.
The lorry rattled along the uneven roads for about half an hour, finally coming to a halt in a virtual tunnel of trees. Each man loaded himself up with all he could carry, and the long column started up the hill, reminding Farnham of Hope and Crosby’s line of African porters in Road to Zanzibar, which he’d seen in London the previous summer with Eileen. The sounds of the lorry – which Henri had instructions to abandon as far from their camp-site as seemed safe – faded into the distance, leaving him to concentrate on keeping his footing and not losing sight of the man in front. Every now and then, though, an image of the woman on the hilltop would come unbidden to his mind, and he would smile to himself in the darkness.
For the next few days the mood in the Maquis camp was little short of triumphant. There were smiles everywhere, and even the blisters which came with the new boots seemed a source of enjoyment. The fact that the Germans had taken no reprisals for the raid on the storehouse was a great relief, and the news that they had mounted a full-scale sweep of the heavily wooded hill beneath which Henri had abandoned the lorry produced great amusement.
With each day that went by Farnham felt less of a stranger, and with only a few exceptions the Maquisards responded warmly to his overtures of friendship. They enjoyed listening to his accent, enjoyed his tales of the war in Africa and Italy, and were interested to hear how England was coping with the war in general, and the influx of Americans in particular. In north-eastern France there were many who still remembered the last Yankee onslaught in 1918.
Mindful of London’s directives, Farnham cautiously probed the political allegiances of his new comrades. Noticing a certain tension between Yves and Jules, who seemed to function almost as joint leaders of the unit, he theorized that it might have a political source. The cynical Yves would be the communist, the patriotic Jules the Gaullist.
As it turned out, both were happy to talk politics with him, and happy to admit that they were socialist in their leanings, by which they seemed to mean nothing more precise than that they expected a better world to emerge from the war. The tension between them, such as it was, stemmed from temperament rather than politics. Yves, who had been a schoolteacher in St Dié, had an analytical brain and a tendency to take things to extremes, whereas Jules, who had worked on the railways all his life, tended towards wishful thinking and overcautiousness. They made a good team.
There were communists in the unit – three of them – but they made no attempt to either hide their political convictions or make them an issue. They seemed just as keen, but no keener than anyone else, to fight the Germans. They didn’t huddle together and whisper secrets to each other, or kneel on the grass and salaam towards Moscow five times a day. In fact, all three seemed perfectly sensible, perfectly ordinary, young Frenchmen.
Farnham had never been very good with names, but by the end of his first week in France he reckoned he could put one to each of the faces in camp. Some, of course, he knew better than others: Charles, the chemist’s son, and Jean-Paul, the farmer’s son, who shared the tent next to his; the cheeky-faced François, who couldn’t be more than seventeen, and his constant companion Paul, who looked even younger; Henri and Pierre, who were brothers, and as nice a pair of lads as Farnham could remember meeting anywhere.
He also got to know the area better, taking himself off on long walks at all times of the day and night. At first he had been escorted, but it didn’t take Yves long to realize that their English guest was unlikely to either get himself lost or stand on the ridge above St Dié waving a Union Jack, and he was soon given licence to roam wherever the mood took him. Above their camp the tree cover was so extensive that views were hard to come by, but every now and then he would come upon one, and find himself entranced by the receding lines of forested slopes fading into misty horizons, the strange outcrops of red sandstone which occasionally broke those slopes, the ruins of medieval fortifications which hung above them. Everywhere he went there were birds to see and hear, from the smallest songbird to the hawk-like creatures hanging on the thermals above the valleys. He added ‘find out which birds are which’ to his list of things to do after the war.
Back in the camp he helped out with the training, offering insights from his SAS experience in Africa to the guerrilla warfare sessions, teaching small groups how best to deal with the Sten gun’s tendency to jam and how to use the time pencils with the plastic explosive. One group of four was chosen for instruction in the use of the S-phone and Eureka-Rebecca sets, so that once he was back in England there would be no shortage of men to guide in supplies or reinforcements. In his mind, Farnham was already rehearsing his pitch for a full SAS team to operate in this area once the Allied invasion was a reality.
It was after returning from one of these classes – he had taken his students up to the drop zone for a real-life simulation – that Farnham was invited to the command tent for a discussion of the unit’s next operation. This, he now heard, would be directed against the locomotive shed in St Dié, where Jules had once been an apprentice mechanic. The specific target was the shed turntable.
Studying the carefully drawn diagram, Farnham realized that the shed was of a type common on the continent but rare in Britain – he could only think of St Blazey in Cornwall, though there were probably a couple of others. It was constructed like a semicircular stable around the turntable, which could be aligned to feed a locomotive into any of the eighteen stalls. Put the turntable out of commission, and up to eighteen engines would be trapped until it could be repaired. And if they destroyed the actual turning plate, then Jules thought it might well be out of operation for months.
He had the know-how, and Farnham had brought the explosive.
The two of them spent most of the next night moving across country to the forested hill which lay south of St Dié, and which afforded a panoramic view of the town. The
station lay directly below them, the junction to its right, the locomotive shed nestling between the diverging tracks. In this hour before dawn the whole area was fiercely lit, and the guards patrolling the area were not from the local gendarmerie – they were regular troops of the Wehrmacht. More than fifty of them, by Farnham’s reckoning.
He had only just finished counting when the air-raid sirens began to howl, and the lights started going out section by section, drawing darkness across the valley like a blackout curtain. Farnham listened for the drone of approaching planes, and after a few minutes thought he could hear some in the distance, but the faint sound swiftly faded. On that particular night the Allied bombers were obviously heading elsewhere.
In the valley below the switches were flicked back on as the Germans drew the same conclusion, and the Wehrmacht guards climbed out of their shelters into the bright artificial light. It occurred to Farnham that an air raid would be a good time to set their charges on the turntable, always assuming that they weren’t hit by an English or American bomb.
The day dawned, and the town beyond the tracks slowly came to life. The two men stayed on watch through the hours of daylight, counting and making notes on each of the trains which steamed through the station. Most were heading west, carrying men and war matériel to the Germans’ Atlantic coast defences, and the few non-military trains which had managed to find a place in the timetable seemed almost empty. These days the Allied air forces were obviously something of a deterrent to travel.
One train which steamed majestically through an hour or so before dusk couldn’t help but capture Farnham’s imagination. The engine, a huge 4-8-2, was encased from end to end in camouflage-painted, streamline-style armoured plating. A real challenge to a modeller, he thought, remembering his own obsession as a young teenager. The planning of that first model railway had been the last time he had truly shared anything with his father, and not long afterwards he came to realize that the man was incapable of dealing with any situation in which he didn’t have complete control. Farnham thought about his sister, and wondered how she was coping with their father. Better than he had, probably.
Alongside him, Jules was becoming fidgety. The Frenchman had been friendly enough, but he was clearly a man of few words at the best of times. He was by no means stupid, but he preferred to express himself through his hands, and he seemed to stare down at the railway as if it were a long-lost lover.
Around seven it was dark enough for them to start back, and three hours of steady walking through the forest brought them home. After a late supper and a long conversation with Yves, Farnham called London on the radio and explained what they needed.
Four days later, as Sunday gave way to Monday, Farnham, Jules and two other Maquisards crouched in the shadows of the fence which separated the road at the bottom of the hill from the tracks. Beyond the latter lay the brilliantly illuminated railway yard and locomotive shed. A few minutes earlier they had heard the voices of patrolling German guards not twenty yards from where they squatted, faces blacked, Stens at the ready.
The team’s number had been kept to four on the grounds that any more would simply have increased the odds on their being spotted, without significantly adding to their chances of escape. They had chosen Sunday because the locomotive shed was more likely to be full, and in that at least they had been right, for sixteen of the eighteen stalls were occupied.
Farnham looked at his watch for what seemed the twentieth time, inwardly praying that London and the RAF weren’t going to let them down, and this time he received his due reward. The sirens began to wail, and one by one the blocks of lights were doused until only one remained. This section lingered for almost half a minute, as if either fate or the Germans were trying to tease them, before its extinction plunged the yards into darkness.
‘Let’s go,’ Jules ordered tersely.
The four men scrambled across the rickety fence and across the tracks, splashing through the ballast and on to the compacted cinders of the yard, barely visible even to each other in the gloom. At that moment two searchlights were turned on, one after the other, on the hills to the west of the town, and as their beams swayed in the night sky the drone of approaching bombers seeped out of the silence.
Jules led them across the confusion of tracks at the mouth of the depot and ducked between a signal box and a platelayers’ hut. The serrated silhouette of the engine shed loomed about a hundred yards ahead; and they ran alongside the access line before skirting round the turntable and slipping inside the first stall. This contained only a tank engine, but the second was playing host to a heavy goods engine, which offered all they could hope for in the way of shelter. One by one the four of them slid themselves down into what Jules claimed was the safest spot in the yard – an inspection pit beneath a locomotive.
The bombers were now loud in the sky, and the crouching men didn’t have long to wait before the first stick of bombs fell. About half a mile to the west, Farnham thought, but it was hard to judge. The German anti-aircraft batteries boomed in response, and another rain of explosives crashed to earth, nearer this time. Farnham had not really expected a direct hit on the railway yard – precision bombing, as everyone but Bomber Command seemed to know, was one of the war’s great oxymorons – but the next detonations proved him wrong. A blinding yellow flash and a thunderous roar left him with ears ringing and the pattern of their sheltering locomotive’s wheels imprinted on his retina.
The bomb had fallen not more than thirty yards away. It would be ironic, Farnham found himself thinking, if it had seriously disabled the turntable, something which Jules claimed would require a detonation within inches of the turning plate mechanism.
The fourth and final stick of bombs landed further east, somewhere in the vicinity of the station, and the four men scrambled out of the inspection pit. They had ten minutes.
Jules and Farnham dropped into the turntable well, leaving the other two crouching at either end of the track bridge, Stens at the ready, eyes scouring the dark yard for premature movement. The searchlights on the hills were still sweeping across the sky but the drone of the bombers was rapidly fading into the east. The second wave was supposed to be about forty miles, or ten minutes, behind the first, and the news of its approach should be keeping the Germans in their shelters.
In the dark well Farnham was moulding the plastic explosive into the area Jules indicated. Satisfied, he pushed home the time pencil and squeezed the detonator. ‘OK,’ he whispered.
As the two men climbed back out of the well a swelling roar in the western sky was announcing the second wave of bombers. This lot were early, Farnham thought angrily, as the four men raced back across the yard and the main-line tracks, flattening themselves behind the fence as the first bombs fell. They weren’t very accurate either – most of the bombs were falling well to the north of the railway, on to the sleeping town. Looking back as they climbed up through the trees, he could see a couple of buildings burning in the distance, and at that moment there was a small yellow flash in the railway yard, followed by a dull booming sound.
Too late, Farnham thought. They had hoped to hide the sabotage within the bombing raid, but the last bombs had fallen several minutes before, and they would be lucky indeed if no one had seen that tell-tale flash.
The following evening a messenger reached camp with the news that it had indeed been seen. The turntable would be out of commission for weeks, maybe months, and the consequent trapping of the sixteen locomotives would cost the Germans several hundred trains in the lead-up to the invasion. They had not greeted this development with the hoped-for stoicism, but had rounded up ten prominent townspeople and hung them from lampposts in the main street. Another ten low-level railway workers had been held hostage for the good behaviour of their more vital superiors. Seven other residents of St Dié had been killed in the bombing, but no Allied planes had been shot down.
Summoned from his tent to hear the news, Farnham had to work hard to keep his attention from wanderin
g. The messenger was the woman whom he had seen on the hill above Ste Marguerite ten days before. Her head was bare this time, the honey-blonde hair tumbling past her shoulders. Her overcoat was open, revealing a pale blue dress with a V-shaped neck and pearl buttons down the front.
‘This is Madeleine,’ Yves introduced her. ‘She’ll be taking you to meet our contact in Schirmeck, who should be able to help you with the concentration camp at Struthof.’
She offered her hand and smiled at Farnham, who smiled back, feeling like a schoolboy. Her eyes were grey, he noticed.
‘Either he’ll have the information you need, or he’ll find someone to take you up the valley for a look,’ Yves was saying.
‘Sounds perfect,’ Farnham said. ‘And how will we get to Schirmeck?’ he asked her.
‘The train would have been the safest – it’s only an hour from St Dié – but all civil journeys have been cancelled for at least the next week.’ She smiled wryly. ‘There seems to be a locomotive shortage, so we must take the bus. Which reminds me,’ she continued, businesslike again. ‘I need to see your papers.’
Farnham handed them over, and watched as she went through them.
‘They are good,’ she said at last, ‘but not good enough. The problem is, they are false.’ She smiled at the expression on his face. ‘They would pass a casual inspection, but the moment anyone tries to check them you will be in trouble. These days we use only real identities, ones which can be checked.’ She put the papers into her bag. ‘I will get you a new set for the trip.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Now, there is a bus that leaves St Dié at two o’clock, and it stops at the crossroads near Raves about twenty minutes later. I will be on that bus on Wednesday, with your new papers. OK?’
Farnham nodded.
Madeleine turned to Yves, and Farnham half listened as she told the Maquis leader about Hans-Magnus Ziegler, the new Gestapo chief in St Dié, who had been responsible for the reprisal executions that morning. Her face was even lovelier in profile, and Farnham’s eyes were drawn to the gentle curve of her breasts beneath the pale blue dress. He looked up to find Yves eyeing him with some amusement, and hoped that the light was poor enough to hide his subsequent blush.
For King and Country Page 8
