Neither Roger nor the wounded man could have understood a word of his jargon but his intention was clear and the man abandoned his first-aid attempts and jumped to obey the order.
“The Boche take one hour maybe to get reinforcements from the town and kom back!” he went on in his atrocious argot, nodding in the direction taken by the fugitives. “You kom with me? I got a motor cycle in the woods and we go for hiding!”
I told him that this was impossible, that I had arranged to contact another agent in the town and follow a line of flight already planned. He was not disposed to argue the point.
“Okay, okay! You do as you bloody please, Mister! From now on all is himself!” Briefly he surveyed the scene around him, obviously deriving great satisfaction from the chaos. “It was the goot strike!” he said. “They noddings get through here for the month! Then we chase the bastards to Uncle Jo, eh?”
I said briefly I hoped so and looked around for the De Gaullist who was supposed to have accompanied Perry and myself back to town. I found him sitting with his back against a tree, his feet at a wide angle and a German submachine gun between his knees. His face was drained of colour and a dark stain was spreading through a wad of improvised bandages wedged under his armpit He was a Breton of about my own age, a big, sun-burned man, whom I had only met the previous evening. When he saw me looking at him he made a pathetic attempt to salute.
“Take my bicycle, m’sieur!” he said, speaking between clenched teeth, “I stay here and get one or two more when they come back!” Then, apologetically: “Is it possible you have cognac in that flask, Capitaine?”
I gave him my flask and he thanked me, politely. There was nothing more I could do for him and I doubt whether he was alive to press the trigger when the Germans returned to the scene.
I scrambled round the wreckage and climbed the northern bank, making my way to the cart track where the De Gaullists’ bicycles had been stacked. I took the first one to hand and pedalled away towards the town, thankful to have found a means of getting there ahead of the survivors of the escort, who had headed away in the opposite direction and would have to make a wide circuit back to the river bank. As I rode I reflected grimly upon our chances of getting clear of the area before a general alarm was raised and the district was cordoned off by other garrison troops alerted by telephone.
Chapter Twelve
I ENTERED the town from the south-west and from the top of the steep street that led down to the bridge I could see signs of activity in the area of the tunnel mouth, near the railway station, although there was no evidence of the air raid damage from this side. It was still early but there seemed to me to be an unusual number of people astir and those I passed looked preoccupied and distraught. I abandoned the bicycle at the top of the street in which Perry’s shop was situated and went on down towards the riverfront, walking slowly, as if I had come out to inspect the air-raid damage.
Just before I reached the shop I squinted along the tree-lined boulevard towards the bridge and saw a black Mercedes, preceded by an armoured car, turn left on to the waterfront and head directly towards me. Neither vehicle was travelling fast but a helmeted German stood on the turret of the armoured car and appeared to be scrutinising each house as he passed.
I was tempted to duck into the alley that I had used when I reconnoitred the house but I changed my mind and took refuge in the cabin of a parked refuse-van, whose driver was nowhere in sight. As I slammed the door I saw a troop carrier, crammed with troops, descend the hill from the opposite direction. It looked so much like a converging movement that I took alarm and ducked to the floorboards.
One of the most reassuring things about fighting Germans is that they are quite unable to go about their business without creating an uproar that gives their opponents warning of their immediate intentions. As the armoured car and the troop carrier approached one another there was a great deal of bellowing and banging and it was obvious that some kind of house-search was in progress lower down the water-front. I peeped out and saw Germans thumping on doors and milling up and down the boulevard nearer the bridge. Their behaviour made me sick with anxiety for it was clear that they had information about the approximate location of agents but were not certain which house sheltered them.
At that moment I smelled burning and on taking a peep saw a thick column of smoke issue from the upper window of the photographer’s immediately opposite. I was on the point of leaping out of the van and dashing into the shop when Diana appeared at the window, waving a rag and shouting down at some Germans hammering on a door fifty yards down the street. She seemed to me to be deliberately attracting their attention. I was so confused that I sat immobile as half-a-dozen men came pounding along to the scene of the fire. At the same time Diana disappeared and the whole area became enveloped in smoke and there was a lot of shouting and the crash of breaking glass. Then, with a soft explosion, the whole upper storey blazed up, flames shooting from the window and licking under the eaves of the roof.
I hesitated no longer but jumped out of the cab, colliding heavily with a woman who had run screaming from the alley alongside the shop. The impact was so violent that she staggered and almost fell. I made a grab to steady her and saw that it was Madame Perry, still in her nightdress. Her face was convulsed with terror and I don’t think she recognised me but before I could speak Diana herself tumbled through the smoke-screen, a bundle in one hand and a Luger pistol in the other. She saw me and shouted something I failed to catch, at the same time grabbing Madame Perry by the neck and bundling her into the cabin of the refuse-van.
“Start her up, Jan!” she shouted, running round the bonnet, leaping in the offside door and slamming it shut.
I obeyed automatically, pressing the starter button and ramming the stiff gear into bottom. We shot off through the smoke cloud, just missing the offside wing of the troop carrier that was descending the hill. The vehicles actually touched and I swerved, mounting the curb and bumping back on to the pavement.
Behind us all hell was loose. Beyond the billowing clouds of smoke that now filled the street we could hear the roar of flames and the shouts and yells of the troops. Someone loosed off a burst of automatic fire in our direction but I ignored this and concentrated on the road ahead, urging the van up the hill and across the square under the castle. For the moment my only concern was to get clear of the town and into the wooded country beyond. I said no word to Diana or to Madame Perry, who was wedged tightly between us severely hampering my steering.
On the far side of the square was a narrow archway through which I had entered the town that morning. Three German soldiers, one of them an officer, were in the act of erecting a roadblock on our side of the arch and two twenty-gallon oil-drums were already in position supporting a heavy baulk of timber. As we roared up the two privates were about to close the left side of the gap and were carrying a third drum between them. I rammed the accelerator to the boards and steered straight for the gap, which was just wide enough to permit the passage of the van.
The officer saw us first and shouted, leaping back against the castle wall and fumbling with the flap of his holster but before he could draw his pistol I had crashed head-on into the other men, knocking them and their oil-drum over the half-built barrier. From her side Diana leaned out and fired point-blank at the officer, her bullets ricochetting against the masonry. One of them passed over my head, shattering the offside window of the cabin. Then we were through and heading for the open country at top speed. I had just enough wits about me to take the road that forked away from the direction of the railway and head towards a belt of woodland a mile or so out of the town.
“Take the track to the right past the clearing!” Diana yelled at me across Madame Perry. I saw it just in time and slewed the van hard right, skidding round in a half-circle and shooting into the trees. Two hundred yards further on I stopped, flung open the door and jumped out and as I did so Madame Perry rolled sideways, her head and one arm projecting from the cabin. She was ston
e dead, her neck broken by the burst fired at us in the town.
Diana climbed out and came round to my side of the van. She seemed miraculously calm and looked down at the corpse without emotion.
“It was better than starving to death in one of their stinking camps!” she said quietly. “Where’s her husband?”
“Dead, up at the railway cutting,” I told her, “I never even had a chance to tell her, damn it!”
“It’s just as well,” said Diana. “How did your show go, Jan?”
“Pretty well!” I said bitterly, “we might even get a medal for it!”
“You smashed that repair train!”
“We blocked the line with the debris. Everybody was satisfied!”
She put her hand on my arm and looked hard at me. “What’s the matter Jan? What is it?”
“I’m sick to death with all this bloody killing and running!” I shouted hysterically, “sick to bloody death of it, you understand? Back there we had to kill prisoners and leave men to bleed to death on the blasted railway track! Now there’s just you and me, and where the hell do we go from here?”
She didn’t attempt to reason with me, seeing my hysteria as a reflex to the excitement of the last few hours, and perhaps the tensions of the days that had preceded it. Under a dead weight of fright and revulsion the eternal spark of my love and admiration for her still glowed but for the moment I felt spineless, flabby and utterly used up. It was she who would have to take the initiative now and I think she realised this.
“First we have to get rid of Madeleine,” she said, “help me carry her.”
We lifted the dead woman from the cabin and carried her across to an evergreen growth on the edge of the wood, setting her down in a hollow and covering the body with twigs and leaves.
“It was strange that you should dive into this refuse-van without even knowing,” she said, as we turned away. “I had it parked for our getaway and meant to use it as far as Le Mans. We can’t now of course, we’ll have to ditch it and steal something else!”
“What the hell was happening back there!” I demanded, “the men who got away from us couldn’t possibly have got into town and raised the alarm yet!”
“Your ambush is a sideshow now,” she said, “the R.A.F. knocked hell out of that tunnel last night Direct hits, half-a-dozen of them! That line will be out of commission for weeks.”
This was good news but I could not see that it helped us very much, except maybe to slow down pursuit. I asked Diana how the Germans had located the area where Perry lived and why a house-to-house search was being conducted along the river front when I arrived. She said she supposed that Perry had been recognised or that his wife had talked indiscreetly. She had been uneasy about them for days and would have arranged an alternative rendezvous had she been able to contact me in time. “I hate saying ‘I told you so, Jan’,” she added, “but you see now that it would have been far better if you hadn’t been so bearish, and let me take part in the ambush. At least we should have had a clear start!”
“Well, you know this country better than I do, so you can take on from here,” I said, grumpily. “Do we go west to the coast, south to where we were picked up last time, or dodge around trying to locate Simon’s outfit and throw ourselves on his mercy?”
She stood thinking for a moment. It was quiet in the wood and the sun was strong over the clearing. Thrushes were singing in the bushes where we had laid Madame Perry and it was only with an effort that I reminded myself we were hemmed in by men who would give a month’s pay to kick us to death, or string us up to the nearest tree.
“We leave the van here and walk due east until we find help or can cross the river and strike the Paris railway line,” she said. “Our papers will pass a train check and it’s always safer by rail. If we can get to Paris we can contact Raoul and he’ll find us somewhere to hide until the Germans pull out. I’m like you, Jan, I’m about through with the war! From now on let the army and the air force take over, we’ve done our share, God knows! By the way, I suppose you heard that the invasion has started!”
I gaped at her, astonishment driving out fear.
“Our invasion? ‘D’ Day?”
She smiled, retrieved her bundle from the cabin and struck off through the close-set pine trees with me trotting alongside like a child.
“When did you hear about it?”
“Oh, at about two A.M.,” she said, “a courier came round and told us that it was to be today. I wonder how they’re getting on?”
“But where? Where is it? For God’s sake, Di, don’t sound so casual about it, it’s the biggest thing that ever happened and if it’s true it’ll make all the difference to our chances!”
“Oh no it won’t, Jan,” she said, realistically, “it’ll make things a lot worse. Every Hun in France will be trigger happy and every road crawling with troops. We might even get shot up by our own side if we show our noses in the open. The courier said they had landed in Normandy, somewhere near Caen, but it’s no good nagging me because I don’t know any more than that. The tunnel raid was a masterpiece. All troops in this area will have to use the roads now that we have air mastery, so shut up about the invasion and concentrate on us! Take a look at the map—I never was any good at geography—and tell me exactly where we are, then I’ll rack my brains about this part of the country. Yves and I spent a lot of time hereabouts before the war but today I can only remember the topography of Sennacharib!”
We stopped in the thickest part of the wood and I had a close look at the map she produced from her bundle. I soon discovered where we were, about ten miles south of Ghislaine St. Père, in the heart of what the tourists know as ‘the chateau country’. Unfortunately, we were a hundred miles from the area where we had been flown out by Lysander the year before and a district where we might have found a temporary refuge. Diana was right when she claimed that rail travel was safer than movement on the roads for now, when the British and American air forces dominated the skies over France, German transport made use of even third-class tracks, the kind favoured by fugitives like us. They also travelled a great deal by night and the only safe way to avoid their convoys and patrols was to move directly across country, the rougher country the better. Down here there were far more uncultivated patches than one could hope to find in the north but there did not seem to be many woods marked on the map and Diana thought we should hole up as soon as possible and seek help at one of the farms as soon as it was dark. There was something to be said for this but my instinct was to put as much distance between ourselves and our field of recent activity as was possible for a pair of foot travellers. After a brief discussion we pushed on to the edge of the wood, crossed some ploughed fields in which we felt very vulnerable, and plunged into another belt of woodland that was not as dense as it appeared from a distance. It was, however, invitingly extensive and we went through it until we came to a narrow glade, dotted with clumps of rhododendrons. Inside the largest clump we burrowed out a nest and after a meal of bread and goatsmilk cheese, washed down by a draught of local wine from Diana’s bundle, we made ourselves as comfortable as possible and slept. As I dropped off I reflected that, all in all, we had been luckier than we deserved and that Diana’s mad escapade in following me to France had already saved my life. Without the refuse-van she had borrowed, I should never have got clear of the district and although I did not know it until weeks later I was, in fact, the sole member of the ambush party to survive. Simon’s men and all the surviving De Gaullists were caught and shot within two days of the attack.
It was almost dusk when I awoke to find Diana sitting cross-legged and smiling down at me, the map spread on her lap. She looked as serene as if we had been on a Foxhayes picnic and the only thing that recalled our present plight was the barmaid brassiness of her hair.
“Has anyone been near?” I asked, sitting up guiltily.
“Not a soul,” she said, “and I’ve explored nearly half-a-mile down the path, almost to the edge of the wood!”
“Didn’t you sleep? We’ve got to walk all night and you should have rested while you could.”
“Nonsense,” she said, “you’ve slept enough for both of us, and as it happens we don’t have to walk all night, we’ve got transport and we’ve got a plan!”
“If you’ve been risking our necks breaking into places …!” I began, half expecting her to tell me that she had a stolen car parked in the glade, but she told me to hold my tongue and listen.
“The trouble with you Jan is that you’ll never surrender the ‘Victoria-papa’ standpoint! Now I admit that it’s rather cosy to be cossetted and protected sometimes, but it’s a luxury I can’t afford at this moment. I told you I know this area and for every contact you’ve got in France I’ve got fifty! That’s why I followed you over here. I was convinced that something like this would happen if you were on the run in Invasion Week. Now listen! When you were snoring I searched my memory for someone I know who is not only reliable but within comparatively easy reach and at last I hit on the right bod, André Lancier, who lives in Tours. We’ll go to him straight away and he can hide us until we are overrun by the Allies or can establish contact with Raoul!”
“Is he one of the De Gaullist contacts? Did they give you his address?”
“Of course they didn’t and I don’t even know whether he’s connected with the Resistance! I haven’t set eyes on the man since the war but I’m a good enough judge of character to be sure he won’t let us down … at least…” and she smiled secretly, “he won’t let me down!”
I was in no doubt at all as to what she meant by this. Lancier, whoever he was, had been one of her lovers and a year ago my pride would have smarted at seeking help from him. Now I was more philosophical and found the situation not without irony.
“He was a vet,” she went on, “and quite a famous one. I used to meet him at Longchamps and I once stayed at his villa, in Biarritz. He was handsome in a rakish kind of way and his wife fancied herself as a painter. Some of the avant garde boys kidded her that she really could paint and she was so grateful that she not only slept with them one after the other but paid handsomely for services rendered!”
Diana Page 66
