‘Just how hard are we trying to stay out of the Germans’ way?’ another man wanted to know.
‘Our aim is to put those railways out of business, and since that’ll be easier if the Germans aren’t actively looking for us, then the longer they remain in ignorance of our existence the better. So we definitely won’t be seeking confrontation with them. Then again, there’s always the chance we’ll just run into them, in which case we’ll obviously do as much damage as we can.’
‘How about the Froggies?’ someone else asked.
‘What about them?’ Farnham asked. The British nickname for the French had lost much of its appeal since he’d met Madeleine.
‘Are we trying to stay out of their way too?’
‘We’re not going to be advertising our presence to anyone, but sometimes a bit of help from the locals will be damn useful. For one thing, they’ll have a better idea of where the Germans are than we will. And that reminds me – a couple of the Maquisards have volunteered to ride along with us, and their presence should reassure any of the locals who have doubts about us.’ He looked round the faces. ‘Anything else? Good. We’ve got the rest of the day to get some sleep, pack up camp and remove all traces of our stay. We’ll be moving out at 2200 hours.’
The men slowly got to their feet. There were a couple of jokes, but the faces were mostly thoughtful. They knew full well what they were in for.
At the appointed hour the engines of a dozen jeeps spluttered into life and the column started wending its way up through the trees to the track which hugged the side of the ridge above their camp. Turning right, they followed it for a mile or so before reaching a fork, and here the two groups separated, waving mute farewells to each other in the dark.
Group A’s road plunged down a narrow valley towards Fraize, and a few scattered lights in the small town were visible when they reached the turn-off they were looking for. This road would carry them through several small villages, Le Chipal and Sadey among them, before reaching the main St Dié–Strasbourg road at Raves, where Farnham had caught his bus to Schirmeck three months before. Here it was hoped that they could cross the main road unobserved and start climbing into the densely forested hills beyond.
The moon was not yet up but once out of the forest they found they could drive without lights at a reasonable speed. Rafferty, Tobin and the ginger-haired Pogo Young – a talkative steelworker’s son from Rotherham – were on point duty in the front jeep, and they were now running a good two hundred yards ahead of the rest of the column. Young was driving, Rafferty beside him, the barely visible map on his knees and both hands on the grips of the half-inch Browning as he scanned the road ahead. Behind him Tobin was grasping the twin Vickers Ks, his eyes scouring the darkness to either side.
Second in line was the command jeep, with McCaigh driving, Farnham checking a second map and the young Maquisard François perched happily in the back. He’d come along for the ride in more ways than one – the foreigners and their heavily armed jeeps had clearly caught his imagination, and the expression on his face as they motored down the winding lane was that of a young boy having his first taste of a roller-coaster. François’ youth had almost disqualified him from the trip, but the boy had more than enthusiasm to offer – after Yves, he had the quickest mind of all the Maquisards whom Farnham had met.
The third jeep contained the taciturn Albert Lowe, Jimmy ‘Wallis’ Simpson and the witty Lancastrian Pete McLaglan; the fourth Sean Mayles, Brendan Armstrong and the mortar; the fifth Brian Shearer, John Downey and Eric Lennon. The sixth and last jeep, performing the ‘Tail-end Charlie’ role, contained the unit’s second sergeant, Andy Lynton, and both of its corporals, the baby-faced Gerry Chadwick and the saturnine Ronnie Hill. Their attention was mostly concentrated on the road behind, which they grimly watched for any sign of pursuit, or any indication that the column’s passage had been noted by unfriendly eyes.
They were now more than halfway to Raves, and had met no other vehicles. The houses of the intermittent villages were mostly in darkness, though a couple of curtains twitched in lighted windows as the column drove by. In the command jeep Farnham tried to keep track of their position on his map, and wondered again if he should have put François in the front jeep, at least for the early part of the journey. He could navigate without a map, but he didn’t have the military experience that would be needed in the lead jeep if they ran into trouble.
So far it hadn’t mattered, for Rafferty had encountered no difficulty in finding and following their chosen route.
The light of the moon was now suffusing the sky above, though the satellite itself was still hidden by the dark bulk of the Vosges to their right. The road twisted this way and that like a pale snake, squirming towards the shadowy massif to the north, whose forested humps were crowned with silver.
Just south of Raves they crossed the road to Ste Marie aux Mines, and a couple of minutes later all six jeeps drew up in the shadow of a high hedge some fifty yards short of the main road from St Dié to Schirmeck. Two cars went by in the direction of the latter, and then, just as it seemed that the road was clear, a long convoy appeared from the opposite direction. It passed slowly by, and the SAS men could see the faces of the German soldiers sitting in the backs of the lorries. Though Farnham’s mind assured him that his own unit was invisible in the shadows, it felt all too visible, and he sat there half expecting the shout, the pointing finger, the squealing brakes.
But the convoy kept rumbling on towards St Dié, and he found he could breathe again. The road, what’s more, was now clear.
The six jeeps raced across like guilty schoolboys, and roared up the narrow road which the map claimed would lead them right up into the hills. Two more sleeping villages presented themselves, and then they were back in the forest, and having to slow down for fear of missing a turn in the dark. The next half-hour was difficult, the roads refusing to conform to what the map expected of them, and after the whole column had twice been forced to double back, Farnham began to feel a touch of apprehension. But their luck changed almost immediately, an attempted short cut proving just that, and they found themselves on an almost straight road for several miles.
It was now past midnight, and they were getting close to the village of Ranrupt, where the Maquis had a sympathetic contact. ‘Half these village names sound German to me,’ McCaigh told Farnham. ‘Are you sure we’re in the right country?’
‘This area’s more like Germany than France in most ways,’ Farnham told him, ‘but the people are really anti-German.’ He grinned in the dark. ‘It’s like you Tottenham supporters,’ he said, recalling something McCaigh had once said. ‘The enemy you hate most is the one just down the road.’
‘Ah, Arsenal,’ McCaigh said. ‘I see what you mean.’
In the seat behind them, François suddenly put his arm between them, pointing ahead. ‘Ranrupt,’ he said, and they could see the roofs of a village a little further down the valley. ‘It will be better if we go in on foot,’ he told Farnham in French. ‘That way we will wake the village when we leave rather than when we arrive.’
Farnham agreed, and was about to radio the lead jeep accordingly when he saw that Rafferty had already pulled it up just ahead. Drawing level, he explained that he and François would go in on their own.
‘We can get a lot nearer than this just rolling downhill with the engines off,’ Rafferty suggested, and they did just that, the line of jeeps, now both lightless and virtually silent, descending the hill like a column of ghosts. About a hundred yards short of the first building, Farnham and François clambered out on to the road and, with Tobin and Pogo Young watching their backs, walked into the village.
Lines of stone cottages crowded either side of the road and others clung to the sides of the widening valley. The Maquisard’s contact, a heavily built farmer in his forties with a mop of dark wavy hair and a luxuriant moustache, lived in one of the latter, and once he realized who it was had come to call, seemed eager to be helpful. Farnham an
d François were treated to glasses of red wine and invited to toast France, De Gaulle and the King before he would get down to business, but the information he had was more than worth the wait. After patiently studying Farnham’s map of the area to the north he confidently picked out three small towns as hosting German soldiers and one section of road along the spine of the Vosges on which foreign workers were constructing defensive positions under German supervision. ‘My son is somewhere in Germany,’ he added. ‘He thought he was safe as a medical student, but he was caught by the forced labour drive.’
Farnham was just wondering where the man’s wife was, always assuming he still had one, when he heard the sound of creaking bedsprings overhead.
‘My wife is a heavy sleeper,’ the man explained, after seeing Farnham’s eyes look up.
Mine was too, Farnham thought, surprising himself. Since meeting Madeleine his thoughts of Catherine had been few and far between.
They took their leave and walked back through the village to the waiting jeeps. The gibbous moon was now riding high above the hills, but the western sky was beginning to fill with clouds. Farnham gave Rafferty a brief rundown on what the farmer had told them, then climbed back in beside McCaigh. The column moved silently forward, only engaging its engines once the trailing jeep was a hundred yards beyond the village.
They drove on through the maze of mountain lanes and tracks, occasionally retracing their steps when a road petered out at the head of a valley, and no doubt provoking whispered conversations of the ‘who the fuck was that?’ variety in several conjugal beds. The strain of keeping a constant lookout was a telling one, particularly after several hours of seeing nothing but trees, but if the standards of watchfulness slipped during the last part of the journey they did so with impunity. The war might have been over for years, the Germans long gone home, for all the evidence of their occupation on display that night.
By two-thirty in the morning the column was within a few miles of its first target – the Bettborn Tunnel, which carried the railway for a mile and a half under a spur of the Vosges – and the search began for somewhere to lie up during the day. This proved more difficult than expected, and Farnham was beginning to feel a slight twinge of panic when they finally found a track which offered disguisable access to the woods above. The tunnel recce teams were sent out immediately, so as to give them plenty of time to dig themselves in before dawn, and the rest of the unit set to work camouflaging the jeeps, digging scrapes and disguising any tell-tale tyre tracks on the dry ground.
Farnham felt content – they had driven well over fifty miles across enemy territory without raising a single alarm. Things would no doubt get more difficult – once they attacked the railway the Germans would certainly know someone was out there – but he thought they had more than a sporting chance of staying one step ahead. Like Yves had said, no one wanted to die on the last day of a war, and it was hard to believe that the Germans wouldn’t rapidly be losing their stomach for a fight.
Rafferty and McCaigh, who had been assigned the western end of the tunnel, took about an hour to reach the wooded slopes above the entrance, and about another twenty minutes to work themselves cautiously into a position almost parallel to the entrance. About a hundred feet beneath them several German soldiers were sitting round a glowing brazier beside a platelayers’ hut.
Since the slightest noise or the dislodgement of a single stone might invite discovery the observation scrape took longer to dig than usual, and it was not until both men were securely ensconced in the finished article that they had time to take a thorough look at the scene below. The small hut, which was set back in a bay carved out of the cutting slope, was about ten yards from the mouth of the single-track tunnel, and there were now four helmeted soldiers gathered round the brazier. They were all wearing long coats, and two had their Schmeisser sub-machine-guns across their shoulders. The hut door seemed to be open but there was no way of knowing if there was anyone inside until one of the brazier men turned and shouted something in that direction. The sound of laughter came from within, maybe from one man, more likely from two.
About forty yards from the mouth of the tunnel, away to the SAS men’s right, the track divided, and just beyond the points, on the other side of the tracks, there was a wooden signal box. The windows were blacked-out, but thin lines of light seeped out around the edges, and they could detect the movement of at least one person inside. Beyond the signal box the cutting slowly widened and the twin tracks disappeared in a long curve towards what looked, in the gloom, like open farming country.
The two men had been taking in the scene for a few minutes when they became conscious of a rumbling inside the earth and realized that a westbound train was coming through the tunnel. There was a momentary flash of light away to the right as the signalman widened one of the blackout slits in his windows, the roar of the oncoming train seemed to surge in volume and a great plume of smoke poured skyward as the locomotive emerged from the tunnel. Twenty-three closed goods wagons followed, their wheels beating out a foreign rhythm on the rails. The French presumably used different length rails, Rafferty thought, as he noted the time and type of train in his logbook.
That done, he made the mime for sleep and pointed enquiringly at McCaigh. There was a breeze in the branches above them, and the vanished train was still audible, but it was hard to know how much noise would carry to the Germans below.
McCaigh nodded, yawned, and laid himself out with his head furthest from the observation slit.
Rafferty looked at the boots twitching a foot from his face and sighed.
In the last hour of darkness three more trains passed through – two more composed entirely of closed wagons, one of flat wagons carrying eighteen Tiger tanks. This latter was defended by anti-aircraft guns mounted on sandbagged flat wagons fore and aft, and seemed worth a brief radio message to the camp, for transmission on to Bomber Command in England.
Dawn finally broke, and two of the Germans started strolling to and fro along the track between the tunnel mouth and the signal box, yawning mightily as they did so. Another, disappearing inside the signal box for several minutes, proved the first of several in search of a morning crap.
As the light improved, Rafferty was able to get a better look at the slopes of the cutting on either side of the line. These were both high and steep, but a man could easily slide down to track level in a matter of seconds. The problem would be managing it in silence, and not giving any of the Germans time to alert either HQ or their opposite numbers at the other end of the tunnel. A well-aimed grenade might take out all of them in one go, but the bang might echo down the tunnel.
It was a solvable problem, Rafferty thought, and he found himself feeling a twinge of sympathy for the Germans below. They were presumably only there to deter any local Resistance units, because there was no way they could hope to survive a determined attack by well-armed regulars.
He began working on a diagram of the area, realizing as he drew that the signal box could be utilized to mask an approach from the men around the hut. There would still be the problem of getting up the steps before the signalman had a chance to alert the next box down the line…
The sound of a train approaching from the west rose above the early-morning birdsong and McCaigh’s faint whistling snores. The locomotive appeared round the curve and the signalman emerged from his box to watch it, giving Rafferty his first good look at the man. There was no way of telling, of course, but he looked French.
The locomotive swept by, leaving its trail of smoke above the cutting as it was swallowed by the tunnel, and the goods wagons rattled after it. Rafferty wasn’t sure why – perhaps he detected some movement through a broken slat – but he had the strong feeling that these wagons were loaded with people. Prisoners of war or slave labour for German factories. Or maybe something worse. He didn’t like the thought that the train was travelling by day, in full view of the Allied air forces, because the Germans didn’t really care what happened to its occupa
nts.
Another hour went by and the sun slowly clambered above the hill behind the tunnel. Shortly after seven o’clock Rafferty heard the sound of a lorry on the road which ran down through the trees to the south, and not long after that a party of six German soldiers came into view beyond the signal box, walking along beside the tracks. They exchanged a few words with the six they were relieving, who then shuffled tiredly off down the track in the direction of the invisible vehicle.
A few minutes later a new signalman arrived, wheeling his bicycle alongside the tracks, and the incumbent departed, having collected his own bike from behind the box.
No more trains appeared, and Rafferty’s tired brain started drifting in unwelcome directions. Whenever his mind was blank she seemed to be there, filling it with anger and resentment and hurt. He tried to think about something else – films he’d seen, the car business he was going to start, even Tommy’s sister – but nothing had the power to shift Beth for more than a few seconds. All those years, and she couldn’t have ever really loved him. It had all been unreal and he hadn’t had a clue. So how would he know next time if he was making the same mistake? Well, that was easy – there wouldn’t be a next time.
Another train saved him, a hospital train, emblazoned with red crosses on each coach roof, and he thought about the men inside it and felt a little ashamed of feeling so sorry for himself.
‘I’m awake,’ McCaigh murmured above the rumbling of the train in the tunnel. He reversed himself rather like a racing swimmer at the end of a pool, pulled the logbook over to his side of the observation slit and gestured for Rafferty to take his turn in the land of nod.
For King and Country Page 16
