“It can’t be so long now,” I said. “When the invasion comes nothing can stop it and Jerry is already chin deep in trouble in the East. Isn’t it a question of who gets to Berlin first?”
“Jerry!” he said, and again, bitterly, “Jerry! You British are incurable! Even now ‘Jerry’ is still the losing cricket side!” His eyes became vacant for a moment. “You see my friend, I have forgotten how to pretend to be British. I think I have forgotten everything except how to hate!”
Before I could reply he crossed over to the silent, pipe-smoking Simon and touched him on the shoulder.
“Look after my friend,” he said, “he is a relative—of a sort!” and then, hitching his rifle, he was gone, leaving me to make what I could of his inadequate briefing and cryptic conversation. He left behind him an atmosphere of defeat and stateness, as though each of us were engaged in an enterprise that was not only lethal but futile.
Simon knocked out his pipe and pointed to the door with the stem.
“I learned Englisch on banana boats,” he grunted, apropos of nothing. “I like to spik it, if you can!”
“By all means,” I said, feeling deflated and hating the sharp taste of bile in my mouth. “Do I wait here until you bring someone to take us on reconnaissance up the line?”
“Roger!” he said, stroking the short barrel of his sub machine gun. “I bring him by daylight. It is safer to look in daylight when I bring the railwayman’s clothes. You are not hungry after you empty the stomach?”
“No,” I said, “I’m not hungry but I could use some sleep. Show me where I can sleep until you come back with Roger!”
He looked mortally offended. “Rachele will show you!” he sneered and stalked out, banging the door. Presently the woman returned and conducted me to a loft over an open shed where they kept their carts and farming machinery. I climbed the ladder and lay down in the hay, not expecting to sleep soundly or for long but I did and Simon had some difficulty in waking me when he came back shortly before noon the next day. He stood over me with the same contemptuous expression as I scrambled to my feet like a schoolboy late for call-over.
“We go take a look,” he said, casually, “I have food for both of us!” He slapped a knapsack he wore and threw at my feet a shapeless bundle of clothes he was carrying.
“Leave the explosives here,” he added and abruptly descended the ladder while I changed into the loose cotton blouse, corduroys and a greasy railwayman’s cap he had brought along.
I knew that he was trying to dominate me and suddenly I felt almost hysterically angry, angry with myself for sticking my head into this noose, angry with Raoul and this boorish Walloon for the stink of hopelessness they had introduced into the enterprise, angry with the Air Commodore for closing the loophole through which I might have escaped, but angriest of all, I think, with Diana for weaving miles of Lilliputian bonds round my life and leaving me as helpless as Gulliver. Sullenly I thrust my personal equipment under the hay and dragged on the coarse, skin-chafing trousers and clumsy boots. I thought: “If I get out of this, if I get out of it, I’ll begin watching out for Number One! I’ll watch out for myself like nobody’s business! I’ll stop being a combination of Don Quixote and bloody Sir Galahad; I’ll stop hanging bicycle tyres round my neck and getting sent off on everyone’s business but my own! If I get free of this I’ll stop rowing and drift for the rest of my life! I’ll be myself at last and everyone else can go to hell!”
I went down the ladder in a dangerous mood to find Simon and an undersized little Breton sitting on the pump trough talking to the woman.
“Roger says we should go across country to the depot and not walk down the line until it is dark,” Simon said.
“Roger will do as he’s bloody well told and so will you!” I growled. “Take me to the nearest point of the line at once! We’ll start from the tunnel end and work south to the depot and we’ll do it in daylight! Now!”
The effect of this outburst surprised me. A warm and childlike smile stole across Simon’s seamed face, displaying a row of broken, discoloured teeth. He took his right hand from his pocket and began to stroke his gun in long, sweeping motions, as though it had been a cat.
“Goot!” he said, and to Roger, who looked ill at ease, “what did I tell you? Capitaine de Royden is nobody’s fool. He picked this man. The man gives the orders! Me? I am tired of playing soldiers in the dark!”
“That being so you won’t need the artillery!” I said, snatching his beloved Tommy gun and tossing it to the woman. “Is Roger armed?” Simon glared at the guide. “Give the Britisch your pistol!” he roared and the man dragged a Luger from his blouse and handed it to the woman who remained impassive.
“Put the guns with my equipment in the loft,” I told her briefly. “Now we march!”
“That’s bloody goot!” said Simon happily. “Now we march!” and he transmitted the order by planting a well-directed kick in the Breton’s behind.
The outburst, or possibly the immediate results of it, did a good deal to reconcile me to my situation during the next day or so. I still thought of my life as more or less over, and I had the strongest conviction that never again would I hold Diana in my arms, but the job itself lost its aura of hopelessness and futility and became a routine task to be carried out in a certain way and to a time-table.
Simon, the Mexican-looking bandit, seemed to take a liking to me and through him my control of the score or so men selected for the strike became a reality instead of something dreamed up by the liaison officers of the British Special Operations Executive and the London De Gaullists. I made a number of reconnaissance trips along the line and I visited the tunnel itself, also the small town of Ghislaine St. Père beyond and later, by night, the repair depot situated some twenty kilometers to the south. The Loire at this point ran in a great, wide bend and the main line railway bridge at Ghislaine St. Père was undamaged by bombs and permanently guarded against the attempts of local saboteurs. I could understand now why headquarters had chosen the tunnel as the point of attack. Its temporary destruction would neutralise two main lines instead of one, and was sure to cause enormous dislocation further south in the area where the enemy’s reserves were stationed. In our area there were few German units and what there were were of poor quality. Apart from sporadic Resistance activity the Germans had had no trouble in this part of France. There was a company of Reservists in the citadel of Ghislaine St. Père and other units within call, but an agent was able to move about far more freely than in the industrial areas further north. I had a railway pass permitting me to be abroad after curfew and as some of the men working with us were railways employees (the best recruiting ground for the Resistance Movement throughout the war) I was able to take my time about choosing an ambush point and hatching out a feasible plan.
Raoul had disappeared into the blue and my only contact with the central organisation and London was via a courier working for the De Gaullists in the Tours area. He brought me a revised date fixing the attack for the night of Sunday, June 4-5th, and I laid my plans accordingly, setting up an ambush at a point about twelve kilometres south-east of the town and five kilometres from the train’s point of departure. I soon realised why a more direct attack upon the depot itself had been ruled out. Not only was it heavily guarded but the train was housed in chalk cliff where a natural cave had been enlarged to accommodate it. It was proof against air attack and could come and go to any section of the line where it was likely to be needed.
The point of ambush I selected was a deep cutting where the line ran between two sections of woodland giving excellent cover at this time of the year. On the Friday before the attack I had a conference with section-leaders and issued their instructions. They received them equably enough but it was obvious that there was considerable mutual antipathy between the various groups, particularly between the De Gaullists and the Communists. Had it not been for Simon’s outspokenness I should have wasted a great deal of time pacifying them. One of the main causes of
contention was the disparity in arms between the sections. The Communists possessed greater and more modern firepower, yet they refused to part with a single rifle or grenade. They had always been more enterprising in raids on small garrison posts and had armed themselves at a considerable cost. They now had a morbid fear that if they surrendered their arms the weapons would be used against them after the war. I gathered this and other useful information from Simon who, once you got accustomed to his banana-boat English, proved an observant and intelligent fellow. He was a great boaster and, in most ways, immature in his judgments, but I had a feeling that he would prove a good man in a crisis. The more I saw of him the more he seemed to belong to the world of boys’ fiction. He was bandit-buccaneer and medieval freebooter in one but there was no doubt about his fanatical hatred of Fascism, or the pleasure he derived from killing Germans.
On Friday morning I had done all I could to prepare for the strike and turned my attention once more to my own plans for ensuring a personal withdrawal from the scene the moment the blow had been struck. I had no illusions about the thoroughness of a German comb-out after the raid and I wanted to put as great a distance as possible between Ghislaine St. Père and myself within an hour of the attack. Simon and the section leaders were not specially interested in my survival. I was there to co-ordinate the attack and after that I could go to the Devil as far as they were concerned. The heavy pessimism that had obsessed me since my last parting with Diana reduced the urgency of an escape plan but presently the instinct of self-preservation asserted itself and I took myself over to the village where the courier lived in the hope that he had received some instructions from London by radio. He had, it appeared, and he was as keen to pass it on and be rid of it as a thief holding hot money. The previous day, he said, he had been given a message instructing me to report to a photographer’s shop in Ghislaine St. Père but for what purpose he did not know. Radio location units had been very active in Tours and the operator had had to close down and decamp before the message could be completed.
I made the best of this information and returned to the farmhouse, leaving a message for Simon saying that I was going into the town to keep the appointment. In the event I did not arrive there until after midday because I had to make a detour in order to check arms and equipment at the dump in the woods. When this was done I borrowed a bicycle and cycled towards the river. I took my time. It never paid to hurry to a rendezvous in Occupied France and I wanted an opportunity to check on the contact before I presented myself.
It was a warm, sunny morning and the old town looked pleasant and welcoming, its mediaeval buildings flanking the great river, its broad streets astir with shabby provincials busy with their meagre shopping. Nobody paid any attention to me and I saw no Germans, at any rate, none in uniform.
I turned right along the waterfront and soon located the photographer’s at the junction of a street leading up to the towering fourteenth-century castle dominating the town. It was a trim little shop, well cared-for and recently repainted. There was a single window displaying wedding pictures and advertisements and behind the shop a studio with windows that looked out on a yard. No one had seen me enter the alley leading to the yard so I stayed there, looking across at the studio window about twenty yards away.
Two people were sitting at a table, eating. One, a woman, had her back to me and the other, a small-featured, walrus-moustached man, presented his profile. He was talking a great deal and gesticulating with his fork. The woman seemed to be listening and throwing in a word every now and again. She had a great mop of peroxided hair under a wide, straw hat and wore a voluminous cloak, the kind of garment French women wear at fashionable race-meetings.
When she leaned sideways to reach for the coffee pot I saw that she was wearing dark sun-glasses.
I studied the pair for a few moments and satisfied myself that they looked harmless, although it struck me as rather odd that the blonde wore her cloak and sun-glasses indoors.
About two yards from where I stood, beyond the open yard-door, was a short flight of steps that led to the flat above. I thought I would make doubly sure by getting inside without their knowledge, so awaiting my chance I slipped across the alley and up the steps to the back door without anyone knowing that a visitor had arrived.
The stairhead door was open and I entered a large and sunny room, full of the hideous furniture with which the average French tradesman clutters his home. Then, thinking myself the cleverest man in the business, I slipped behind a curtain and composed myself to wait until someone arrived.
About twenty minutes passed before someone mounted the steps and entered the room. I could tell it was the woman by the click of heels and when she passed close to the curtain I could hear her breathing. She drifted about for a moment and then took a seat facing the window and lit a cigarette but she seemed unable to relax for almost at once she got up, crossed to the door, locked it and sat down again. A whiff of her perfume reached me where I stood behind the curtains and I heard her chair creak and rustle as she fidgetted.
Suddenly I began to feel foolish. It occurred to me that I had taken theatrical precautions but I reminded myself of the fate of other agents who had walked blithely into traps set by the Gestapo or French Quislings. Ordinarily we worked only with people we actually knew and entered the houses of those of whom we had first-hand knowledge but it was the circumstances rather than the background of this appointment that worried me and perhaps also the fact that orders for the rendezvous had come directly from London and not through the local group. I reflected that Simon, for instance, had no clear idea of where I was and that if I failed to turn up at our next meeting our entire operation would be jeopardised.
I glanced at my watch and saw that it was now close on thirteen hundred hours and my failure to appear, no doubt, accounted for the woman’s restlessness. Her obvious uneasiness, however, convinced me that she must be genuine so at length, with a preliminary cough, I stepped smartly from behind the curtains and covered my embarrassment with a bow.
“Madam!” I said and spoke my code name.
The effect was farcical. The blonde leaped to her feet with a cry of alarm and gave back so quickly that her high-heeled shoe caught in the edge of the rug and she fell on her side and rolled over on her face. Her straw hat and her sun-glasses fell off and her skirt shot up, revealing wide-legged panties and a generous expanse of bottom. She made a partial recovery and a swift movement with both hands rescued decency. Then, as she jerked herself upright, it was my turn to gasp. The blonde on the floor was Diana!
I don’t think I have ever been so astonished in my life. Every other surprise I had had up to that time was a lift of the eyebrow compared to the amazement I felt staring down at Diana, her expression a comic mixture of dismay and alarm. Her posture was equally undignified. She had one leg exposed as far as her suspender-clip and her ridiculous blonde hair flopped over her shoulders like a vast, yellow mat.
I tried about half-a-dozen times to say something but all that emerged was a series of squeaks.
We must have stayed like that all of thirty seconds, Diana absorbing the shock of the fall and fright, myself gaping down at her, gibbering and fluttering my hands like a man confronting a spectre. Then, in a single swift movement, she scrambled up, jumped forward and grabbed my hands. Colour flooded her cheeks and she hopped up and down, one heel hanging by a shred of leather, her chewed-looking tresses bobbing up and down, the light of laughter and mischief rapidly ousting shock and surprise from her eyes.
“Oh Jan, Jan!” she bubbled, “I might have known you would have done something like that, you solemn, deliberate, cautious, play-it-safe old clot! It’s me, Jan! Really me! Take hold of me—there!” and she flung her arms round my neck and kissed me half-a-dozen times without pause.
Very slowly I began to relate this laughing, bobbing ghost to someone real and tangible and gently disengaged myself from her enthusiastic embrace. All manner of sensations flooded in, driving out the dazed be
wilderment that had paralysed me the moment her floppy hat and sunglasses had fallen off but in the van of my emotions came a horrid, gnawing fear, an absolute certainty of impending disaster that clawed at my belly and milked the strength from my limbs. My knees buckled and I flopped down on the window ledge behind me.
“How—how did you get here? Why are you here? Why? How? In God’s name, Di, what’s the meaning of this bloody tomfoolery?”
She pouted but the laughter remained in her eyes. Lifting her foot she ripped away the trailing heel and sat facing me, crossing her legs and folding her hands with deliberate primness, like a Victorian governess about to commence the day’s lessons.
“Did you really think I’d let go that easily, Jan? Do you imagine I was impressed by all the mumbo-jumbo idiots’ talk over in England nowadays? God bless my soul, I sized up the average British male years ago! All this secrecy and counter-signs! All those awful ‘Hitler-is-listening’ posters in trains and cafés! How did I manage it? It was easy! When you turned me down I waited until you were out of the way and offered my services to the De Gaulle outfit! I had luck, mind you, your sudden disappearance into a sealed-off Coastal area gave me the chance I was waiting for! The French were a pushover. A Frenchman realises that a woman’s place in the world isn’t confined to the bedroom and the kitchen! There’s no ‘not-quite-the-thing-y’know-for-the-ladies-to-poach-a-feller’s-preserves,’ about them! They accepted me at once and let me volunteer for this particular strike, they didn’t even tell the S.O.E. until after I’d gone!”
“Did you come alone? Were they that stupid?”
“No,” she said, gaily, “I came over with Claude Perry, one of their new agents. He’s downstairs right now but don’t tell him more than you can help because he isn’t much good. He only volunteered because he simply couldn’t stay away from his Lucille any longer. Lucille is his wife and they were parted after the Germans moved in. She’s been running the shop since he got involved in the Resistance. She’s rather sweet, very docile and pretty, absolutely your type, Jan!”
Diana Page 64
