by Thomas Wood
We rounded a corner and were suddenly faced with what must have been one of the largest, and grandest, buildings that I had ever seen. Stretching for about four hundred yards, both left to right, there were two sections of roof that rose higher than the rest on either end of the building each housing two flagpoles; I supposed these had held the tricolour until fairly recently, but now the red, white and black amalgamation of the Nazi Swastika fluttered almost gracefully in the slight breeze.
Great stone pillars had leapt from the floor, above which massive sheets of glass had been used to pour light into the station, with even more sheets being used in the roof itself. It was a truly magnificent building, but I couldn’t take too long to admire it, as my focus was on the hundreds of people running in and out of its grand entrance at ground level.
As we wandered through the entrance ourselves, we blended in perfectly with the thousand or so other people all around, some milling around waiting for their train, others charging to make sure they didn’t miss the one due to leave in three minutes time. The entrance lobby was dominated by a large clock that rose on a metal structure from the floor, with at least five pairs of eyes staring at it at any one time. Around the perimeter of the lobby were small shops, selling everything from freshly baked bread to small toys and books to keep you entertained on your journey, one girl was even lugging a barrow around, stuffed to bursting with flowers of all different shades and varieties.
“We should walk around the edge first.” She was right, there was no point in standing in one place and hoping that our contact would come to us and praying that no Germans wandered over in our direction, so we began pacing around the outside, prioritising those who seemed to be sitting on the plethora of benches that had been chucked all around the station.
As we walked, Cécile suddenly pushed her arm through mine, and I almost stopped completely to look at her when she did. Instead, I tried to stay focused and hope that we looked like a nurse and her patient, innocently walking arm in arm before our train departed.
I began to panic as no one seemed to stick out at me and I became convinced that we were going to be picked up at any second. Cécile must have felt the tension in my arm as she gave it a little squeeze.
“They will be here, don’t worry.”
As she whispered in my ear, I made eye contact with a young German soldier, not much older than myself, but quite clearly more confident in himself than I was. We stared at each other for a moment or two, before he slowly began to stride over from one side of the hall towards us.
I pulled Cécile round in a sharp wheel and began to walk further in to the station, not wanting to make for the door due to a petrifying fear of how guilty that would make us look. Me being killed, I could just about stomach, but the thought of Cécile lying there, bullet holes leaking all of her bodily fluids out on the floor, begging for one final round to be put through her skull, was something I simply could not live with.
I feared the worst as we turned, just as a body slammed itself in between Cécile and me. A young girl looked up at us from the floor, her blue beret now lying to her side.
“Desole,” she murmured as she began chuckling, obviously frightfully embarrassed. It was as she picked up her newspaper that I really began to take an interest in the girl. I shot a glance at Cécile, she had spotted it too. The girl looked at us individually for a second, the cogs quite clearly working on overtime as she tried to make sense of what had just happened.
In an instant, the cogs clicked, and she went into gear.
“Follow me, five or six paces behind. We will need to move quickly. You have a German over your shoulder.”
As she paced off towards the entrance of the station, I waited to hear the calls of the soldier as he stopped to question us, but it never came. He must have been petrified that he would miss his train home and wouldn’t get to spend time with his mother if he took the time to pointlessly question a Red Cross nurse and her patient.
The girl’s pace slowed the further from the station that we got, until it was impossible not to catch her up without looking ridiculous.
“We were expecting a man,” Cécile declared, as soon as we seemed to be out of earshot from anyone within fighting age.
“There was a problem. He is with the Germans now. You have me.”
She spoke matter of factly, and soon risked falling in beside us as we walked.
“I will be taking you to a hotel, our house was searched by the Germans last night. Don’t worry, we can trust the owner, we are good friends.”
I hoped that they were far more than just good friends, especially when they found out that they would be harbouring a British soldier in one of their rooms for who knows how long. My legs began to cramp up and my side ached more than ever as the girl’s pace picked up excitedly, and I sensed that we were edging ever closer to the famous hotel the girl continued to go on about.
“There,” she said, turning to look at us, “Hotel La Romaine, that is where you go.” She pressed a wad of notes into Cecile’s hand, smiling.
“Good luck,” she said, without a hint of sincerity or care in her voice, “I must go. Goodbye.”
We gave her a few seconds of beret bobbing before we began our final few paces into the hotel.
It was much warmer in the hotel lobby than it had been in the breezy outdoors of the Parisian streets, and before too long I was beginning to feel small balls of sweat form up in my armpits, ready to begin their fall to earth, not really sure whether it was because of the contrast in temperature or my nerves that was causing the sweating.
Cécile took the lead and was soon engaging in conversation with the young woman who was sitting at the desk, a book upturned on the counter that we must have disturbed her from reading.
“This is the owner’s daughter. She has been waiting for us. Fill out this form for her.”
The form wanted many details including where our onward journey would be after departing the Hotel La Romaine and how many nights we were planning on staying. Neither of us knew how long we were meant to be here, so we left it blank, letting the girl at the desk fill in that number as soon as we had departed.
I handed mine back to the girl, who immediately began scribbling all over it, spinning a fresh, identical form over to me, raising an eyebrow as she did so.
“If you were from Nortkerque, you would not spell it the English way.” She chuckled as I began refilling the form, this time making sure I spelt it correctly and not the English way of N-O-R-T-K-I-R-K. “You won’t get very far making mistakes like that I’m afraid.”
She was right, I’d need to be incredibly careful from now on, and made sure that if I needed to write something down, that Cécile was right beside me, just in case I made a fatal error in front of a German guard. We had got off lightly with this one, my mistake would never make it much further than the fireplace in the living quarters of the hotel, or so I hoped. We might not be as lucky next time.
We lugged our belongings upstairs, and briefly said goodbye to one another as we entered our neighbouring rooms. It was basic, but I became comforted at the fact that slowly but surely, the levels of hospitality that I was experiencing, courtesy of my French assistors, was slowly improving each time I stayed somewhere.
I pulled the curtains back on the far side of the room, pulling up a small, rickety chair that creaked as I perched on it, and took in the view. I couldn’t quite believe that I, an officer of the Royal Tank Regiment, was currently sitting in the middle of Nazi occupied France, Paris no less, in the greatest comfort that I had been in for a very long time. It bewildered me that I was sitting here, with no real threat of capture, in what would surely become one of the tightest held cities in Europe, where no one would be able to do anything without the Germans knowing. Here was I, having been helped by an army of Frenchmen and women already, and the prospect of another army tirelessly working away until I got home, without the Germans having the slightest suspicion as to who I really was.
; I began laughing to myself, quite heartedly and unashamedly, as I looked out across the landscape and wondered, ‘Was I the only British soldier, evading capture, who had a perfectly unspoiled view of the Notre Dame Cathedral?’
26
I was slowly getting used to Parisian life and found that I started throwing myself headfirst into the culture of France. Once I had started, it was relatively easy to get distracted, and forget that I was in enemy held territory.
It started out with small excursions with Cécile, familiarising myself with the protocol of being stopped and papers being examined. Each time I was asked, a wave of exhilaration washed over me, hoping in some way that they would notice something was wrong and that element of excitement would spark back up in my life.
The small excursions down the road and back up with Cécile soon expanded and we found ourselves frequenting all the local tourist attractions that the young soldiers wanted to visit themselves. The Eiffel tower, the River Seine and, my personal favourite, the plethora of churches and cathedrals that the city seemed to be awash with. I loved dipping inside one and drinking in the peace and serenity that they had to offer. In here, it seemed that it was even safer than the hotel, like the Germans wouldn’t dare enter a house of prayer to search for an on the run soldier. I slowly began to get more comfortable in one church in particular, where I soon began conversing with the priest in English, eventually telling him my whole story on how I had got to where I was. It all seemed pretty reckless, but I needed that danger back, the one that had had me looking over my shoulder every five minutes thinking there would be a gun to my head. I was careless in talking to the priest in that way, but I was never so brash that I told him the name of the hotel that I was staying at.
As well as all the sightseeing opportunities that Paris offered, it also offered an incredible cuisine, the range of tastes and delights like I had never experienced before. We ate in small creperies and in sidewalk cafes and on one occasion, in a high-end restaurant, across the plaza from the Eiffel Tower, courtesy of our friends sorting out the next leg of our journey.
While we were tucking into yet another rich meal prepared for us, I looked around at the rest of the people scoffing their faces. Every other table seemed to be housing at least one member of the German High Command, Iron crosses and brightly coloured collar patches adorning their already highly decorated meals.
I caught Cécile’s eye as I scanned the room, wondering how much quicker the war would end if I somehow had a machinegun stowed away under the table right now. With a curt shake of her head, and the re-emergence of that icy cold glare, I looked away from them, settling instead into the conversation about the glorious taste of the food.
As well as the Parisian lifestyle, I was quite used to having female company and I found myself growing increasingly fond of Cécile. It was difficult to put a time to how long we had now been together, but it had been long enough to know that we were both feeling the same about one another, and that if one was to be dragged away, the other would find it almost impossible to continue. We spent almost every hour of our waking lives together in those few weeks in Paris, continually chatting until all we had to talk about was the weather that day and sporadic observations of the French people. Regardless, we loved our moments of silence together, and wallowed in the warmth of each other as we began to interlock our fingers under the dinner table on more than a few occasions.
“What will you do?” I asked, during another afternoon spent drinking coffee outside a pavement café. “I’m trying to get back to England. But what about you? Where are you trying to get to?”
“Honestly…” she said in between sips from her mug, “I haven’t thought that far ahead. I always thought the plan would be to drop you off. Say goodbye. But somehow, I don’t think I would be able to. I think…” She cut herself off from speaking as the tears and sobs caught her in the back of her throat. Waving her hand in the air as if there was a fly around, she urged me to move the conversation on to something else.
I watched her face as the redness of embarrassment and sadness slowly began to ebb away and realised that it was because of her that I was enjoying my time here, so much so that I wanted to stay.
Why would I leave this city when I had everything here that I wanted? It was peaceful, there seemed to be no prospect of a sudden war re-emerging here and I had a woman by my side who I had grown to love and who, I hoped loved me. Why would I want to go back to England where, within months, I would be back out somewhere in the world, fighting an enemy that was clearly superior to us?
Why?
Just as I contemplated voicing my concerns about going home and actually saying out loud the idea of possibly staying in Paris for the duration, my peacefulness and enjoyment in the city was suddenly shattered late one evening. Cécile and I had returned from the hotel restaurant situated downstairs through the lobby, and I was now preparing myself for yet another night of staring out across the inky darkness of a blacked-out Paris, trying to draw myself a picture of it and point out where all the famous landmarks were positioned when, all of a sudden, there was a scream.
The scream was female, and it came from downstairs in the lobby. Immediately, I pushed my ear to the door to try and work out what was going on. Taking the glass bottle of water that stood on my minute bedside table, I clattered it into the back of the chair so that all I was left with was the razor sharp, jagged edges of the neck and I held it threateningly in my right hand.
By now, the shouts were male, and several pairs of feet began thundering away outside my door. Holding the bottle backwards and completely out of sight, I waited a moment, before opening the door, slowly. Just as I went to poke my head out to look down the corridor, three pistol shots rang out through the halls.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
I recoiled suddenly, waiting for the sound of bullets ripping into the door frame around me, but for some reason, they never came. They can’t have been firing at me.
I risked poking my head out once again, this time summoning enough bravery to look right down the corridor, towards the noise.
As soon as I had seen what I had, my head recoiled back inside, quicker than if three more bullets had just been fired towards me.
A handful of enemy soldiers were standing in the hallway, accompanying two others, who had started to drag a bloodied body back down the hallway with them. I couldn’t see exactly from which room they were coming, but it must have been the door next to Cécile’s. It must have been.
The soldiers were commanded by one officer, who had been standing in the corridor, buckling his pistol holster back up having used it in a clinical fashion. Next to him stood two men, both wearing identical, almost floor length jackets, over the top of what must have been a crisp, clean suit. One man had a trilby hanging loosely from his fingers, while the other had been frantically scribbling something down onto his notepad.
From what I could tell, none of them had seen me and, as the screaming continued for the next five minutes or so, I slowly shut my door, making sure that I had locked it perfectly, with my trusty chair wedged under the door handle, ensuring that there was no prospect of a rude wakeup call from any of their colleagues from the Gestapo headquarters.
I didn’t sleep a wink that night, instead involuntarily opting for lying on top of the bed sheets, fully clothed and bags packed, ready to make a run for it at the slightest hint of further trouble. I didn’t know who they had taken and why, but surely, they would be checking the forms that we had filled in when we had first arrived, noticing that Cécile and I had not filled in how many nights we would be staying. Particularly strange for a couple who had spent the last three weeks in the same hotel now.
As I laid on my bed, I recalled how foolish I had been; gallivanting around Paris to look at the attractions, eating dinner with German commanders and that priest! What was I thinking believing that he would live up to the scrutiny of the Gestapo if that situation arose! How truly idiotic.
My bubble
had been well and truly burst. There was no way that I would be able to stay in Paris for much longer now, even if they weren’t on to me, my nerves were shot already. I couldn’t carry on living like this indefinitely and I knew that the sensible thing all along would have been to try and make it home and carry on the fight. Sometimes there was more important things than the futile fluttering of the human heart, occasionally you have to put that on the back burner and do the right thing instead. Even if the right thing might end up getting you killed.
I decided that the next time we met with our contacts, that I would insist the whole process needed to be sped up and that we would leave in the next day or two, regardless of whether things were in place or not.
They were getting far too close to me now.
27
As the hustle and bustle of Parisians getting on with their lives casually, blissfully unaware of what had happened here in this hotel the night before, so too did the noises of the hotel slowly resume back to normal.
I made out the sound of an unloading truck, taking the daily supplies of food and drink to the stores, located on the left-hand side of the building, down a service alleyway, the phone rang a number of times down in the lobby but, perhaps more comforting, was the sound of people walking up and down the hallway.
I sat, with my head pressed up against my door for what felt like hours, trying to listen in, attempting to work out who was walking past my room. It can’t have been soldiers, that was for sure, their footsteps far too light on the aging floorboards to be wearing the polished leather jackboots that I had become so accustomed to seeing out and about recently. I willed someone to speak, in the hope that I would recognise the language that they uttered, to confirm to me that it wasn’t just a detachment of the local Gestapo headquarters who had conveniently booked themselves in overnight.
But no one said a word, especially as they neared the blood ridden door frame that had been blasted open in the early evening last night. It was as if everyone assumed it had been the doorway that stitched up the poor occupant of the room.
