by Thomas Wood
I tried to sound soothing, sympathetic almost, but I wasn’t sure if I was getting through to him or not, he offered no hint of how he was feeling about the whole situation.
“You have got out before, I am right in thinking?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Then you will know full well that the Germans have got a clamp around us. They have been tightening it over the last few months, weeks especially. We don’t seem able to work in the same way that we did before Christmas. It has made everyone jumpy. Cynical.”
He said nothing for another few moments, in which time I chanced a look at my watch, it was rapidly approaching midday and I suddenly became very aware of my exhaustion. We needed to try and wrap this up soon, we desperately needed to make some headway in our negotiations, or all my attempts to remain concealed last night would be totally useless.
“It is not our incompetence Mr Lambert. It is just the Germans tightening their grip on every aspect of our lives. It is becoming more and more dangerous for us to work here.”
“My real name is Lewis,” I said, trying to increase his confidence and trust in me in some way, “Alfie Lewis.” I would have to wait to see if that was a mistake on my part or not.
“Then what is your plan, Mr Lewis?”
Originally, my plan had been to guide the resistance in the way that they handled everything, to try and get it all running like a factory and give our boys the best chance at getting home. But now, I could see that that approach would not work, I would need to see for myself how they executed their attempts first hand.
“Put me on an escape. Place me alongside other soldiers and treat me just like you would if I wasn’t one of Jimmy’s friends. If I get home, I will pass on to you the suggestions. If I do not make it home, then you will have to work them out for yourself. How does that sound?”
“That sounds fair, Mr Lewis. We can do that for you. It is only Louis and I who really know why you are here. The others will still treat you the same.”
“Thank you, Joseph,” I said, again, trying to replicate the reverence that I felt he demanded, “oh and while I am here, it is probably best to keep calling me Lambert. Just in case.”
“Absolutely, Mr Lambert.”
He got up from his chair, chucking his empty mug towards the sink with a clatter, before making towards the door. He turned and looked at me one final time and spoke.
“If I do not see you again Mr Lambert, please thank Jimmy for his concern. I will always remember what he did for me.”
He sped from the room too fast for me to ask what he meant by that, but immediately my imagination got to work again on what the true relationship was between these two men, praying that it didn’t in some way put me in any kind of danger.
Louis reappeared in the room, clothes bundled under his arms which he offered to me, as if I was some kind of royalty.
“You will be needing these…Mr Lambert,” he said with a wink and a smile. He had seemingly relaxed now that everyone had left his home and his true character began to shine through what was a very timid and apologetic exterior.
“Don’t worry. I won’t say a word.”
“Thank you, Louis,” I said, with a little bow in my head of my own.
“My wife and son will be back soon enough. Then I will take you to meet some more friends.”
I thanked him again, each time getting a smile in return that said to me that it meant the world to him to finally be appreciated.
Sitting in the armchair by the unlit fireplace, I began to wind down from the goings on of last night and this morning, especially now that my uniform was buried six feet under the ground in a local forest.
I checked my watch again. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The perfect time to try and let my eyes catch up on the rest that they were screaming out for.
9
The next few weeks I spent the vast majority of my time preparing for a far more organised exfiltration from France than I had done previously. I marvelled at the way in which the whole thing seemed to work like clockwork, from the first day receiving my clothes, right up until the point that we were given a date to leave.
The Frenchmen assisting us were professional in their outlook and discreet in their conduct, and all of the helpers that I met filled me with the greatest confidence of what they were doing here.
The wound on my cheek was healing nicely, having finally got some proper medical attention to it. It was cleaned scrupulously by a local man, who claimed to be a doctor, but the contents of his medical bag seemed to suggest he was more of a mechanic these days. Nevertheless, I was cleaned and stitched up quite professionally, with only a small scar in a ‘Y’ like shape just beneath my eye socket, as the only reminder of my close call with the exploding Whitley.
Everything seemed to be perfect, perhaps too perfect, a thought which troubled me the closer we got to our leaving date. There was a major issue in the numbers of men that they managed to get out of the country, only achieving one in two of their attempts. But their preparation and planning was impeccable.
The identity cards that I had been issued with were of the highest quality and far better looking than the ones I had received myself last year. Backstories were given and made watertight, to the point where locals were contacted to corroborate that their nephew from the south of France had come up to visit them, just in case the Germans really wanted to put our stories to the test. Everything they did seemed to be just right, and I couldn’t pick out a single element of what they were doing that was causing them to fail so badly.
I continued to observe, to experience their latest attempt but at the same time, I tried to remain subtle and thought that it would be best to build up as many friends as I possibly could, while I was there. Who knows, I might be back again in a year’s time and need even more help than before.
I was joined after a week or two by two other men, both officers in the army, but now opting to go by their newly assigned names of Jacques and Julien, not wanting to risk revealing their old identities for fear that we could not truly trust one another. It was a wise choice, I only revealed to them that my name was now Michel and that I had once upon a time been a navigator in a downed bomber some weeks before.
Jacques and Julien had been part of the BEF and were instructed to hold the fort at Calais for as long as was humanly possible, about eight months before I had met them. Their positions had been completely overrun, their commanding officer killed and quite a few of their experienced NCOs had put a gun to their own heads. There had seen soldiers, both experienced and inexperienced breaking down in tears at the thought of becoming a German prisoner of war, but Jacques and Julien had accepted their fate.
Going into the bag, according to them, was one of the hardest things that they had ever had to do, but had been the easiest part of the whole process for them. After they had laid down their arms, they were beaten and mocked by the conquering army, before they had started a march, a long, gruelling march, to a destination that had not been revealed to them.
Jacques, the more headstrong of the two, had been convinced that the destination had been Germany itself, the remnants of a broken army, finally humiliated by staggering into the heartland of the very country it was trying to defeat. Julien had been more convinced by the argument that they were heading to one of the other conquered nations, Poland perhaps, where stories were rife about the brand-new prison camps that had sprung up there for the hard labour of captured troops.
They were united in agreement of one thing however, the Germans had treated them as subhuman, that the treatment of the captured troops was so barbaric, that they had no intention of staying with them, agreeing that they had to get away from the march as soon as they possibly could.
They were not given any food, and any man straying into the fields to scavenge a raw potato or accepting a piece of fruit from a friendly local, would be struck down by the butt of a rifle and left to writhe in agony before being dragged behind the rest of the c
olumn.
Their column was laid down in a field overnight, exposed to the elements while the guards all took beds in the nearby village, guarded by only a handful of unenthused soldiers who had looked too old to still be in the military. It hadn’t been hard for them to simply walk off, but the motivation to do so, after so much humiliation and lack of food, was so low that they almost considered abandoning their attempt.
After walking for days, stealing off locals and scavenging everything else, they were taken in by a French farmer, who offered them food and shelter, in return for working in his fields. There they had stayed, working the crops as if they were locals, with a group of other soldiers, both French and British, until they realised that the Germans were beginning to tighten their grip on the rural fields of Northern France, checking the papers of random labourers and farmhands. It was time for them to go.
I enjoyed having some British company with me in this part of France, it was unusual to me, to be able to talk in fluent English with two men, whose goal was exactly the same as mine, although our intentions were wholeheartedly different. I became quite close with them and we promised to reveal our real names to one another, when the danger of being strung up by the Gestapo was a little less pressing.
I became bold enough as to call them my friends, but there was one man that I would have considered as one of my best friends, the one that seemed like nothing was too much trouble for him.
Louis was my go to man, the one that seemed to know everyone and everything, but I found it strange as to why he was not held in such a high esteem as someone like Joseph, when he was clearly doing a lot of the legwork, simply for Baudouin to take the credit.
I stayed in his house, with his wife and son, and we soon had the house back up to the hygiene standards expected of a royal, instead of the dirty, damp mess that the resistance had left it in, after nights of expectantly waiting in his sitting room.
He had all the answers to all of my questions and, as we got to know one another, I started to feel like I could trust him, rely on him not to go to anyone else with the rambling thoughts of my mind.
We often stayed up late into the night, talking about things back in Britain and how he longed to move himself and his family there one day, or his life when he was much younger and could remember the tales of daring that his father used to tell him about the previous war. It was one of these such evenings, where I finally brought up the subject of something that had been troubling me for the last few days, after his wife and son had retired to their bedrooms for the night.
I couldn’t trust Joseph, I didn’t know why, but I wanted to try and discern as to why I thought that Jimmy’s faith in him was unfounded.
“Did you know Joseph before the war?” I asked innocently enough, a few nights before our departure date. I knew that I had grabbed his attention with my question, as he shot me a look so fierce that I felt a sharp pain shoot through my heart.
“What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly feeling like I was on the back foot, “it just seems like he is very used to being in this house.”
I let the silence hang for a moment, before turning towards the fireplace to drink in some of its heat. The weather had become uncharacteristically frosty in recent days, with a light dusting of snow coming down that afternoon which had seemed to have accelerated the chill that I was experiencing in my bones.
I wanted to be careful about how I went about this. Louis was my most trusted friend, certainly the only one who would really be able to do anything if things started to go wrong, and so I didn’t want to lose him. As I had asked the question, the look on his face made it seem like I had offended him somehow, a notion which I was eager to reverse if I had.
Just as I took a breath in, to change the subject matter on to something else, Louis began to speak.
“Yes…I knew him before the war.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke, and I got the impression that it wasn’t a relationship that he was particularly proud of, or one that he held dear to him. I decided to leave my prying at that, and let him continue himself if he wanted to, but otherwise I would just have to settle for the small acknowledgement for now.
“We both grew up around here. We were the same age, so we knew of each other for a long time.” His tone had suddenly changed from one of annoyance and frustration to one that was almost like a whine, overwhelmingly melancholic.
“He was from a very wealthy family in the area. He has always felt superior to most of us lot, that is why he is enjoying this war so much, it brings it out of him. He liked to bully me as a child, not physically, but he used to degrade me so much that I used to feel useless. Then, as we got older, he simply got his followers to beat me and humiliate me in front of everyone.” He spoke like he had become desensitised to it all now, but I could tell, deep down in the darkest pit of his mind, he was replaying the times in his head right now of when Joseph used to call in his attack dogs.
“Then, suddenly, he pretty much disappeared. Someone told me that he went to university in London. He made many good friends over there.”
“Is he still in touch with any of them?” I asked, beginning to shape an idea as to how he might have known Jimmy on a more personal level than he had previously let on.
“I’m not sure…” he said, drowsily, like he was letting me down somehow by not being certain, “he does talk about one man in particular though, quite often. He must still be talking to him I suppose.”
I didn’t need to ask for confirmation on that one, I knew it had to be Jimmy. So that is how the two of them knew each other then, they had met at university in Britain somewhere, had stayed in touch and were now using their friendship to bring the war to a swift end.
“After being at university, the next thing I heard was that he had joined the French military. That must have been back in ’34 or ’35 maybe. I saw him from time to time, when he came to visit his parents but, after they both died, he didn’t have a reason to come back here, he just stayed with the army.”
“So how did he avoid the fighting last year? Surely he would have seen some sort of action?”
“That is the weird thing about him. Three, maybe four days before we declared war on Germany, he was back. No explanation. No uniform. He was just back in the village again, staying with his aunt and uncle. He did not get on with them so well and as a result went to the only person in the village that he recognised. Me. He spent most days sitting here after that, every day apologising for what he used to do to me as a child. I have forgiven him for what he did, I feel no malice towards him, but I will always remember what he was capable of. As a child, I used to regard him as pure evil. And I am convinced that he is still capable of being just that. Fortunately, his attention has turned to the Germans now, thankfully he is on our side of the fence.”
I pondered everything for a moment, wondering why this man who had been in the military had suddenly left, especially as his nation seemed on the brink of war; I couldn’t imagine his superiors simply letting him go like that. I began to explore different paths in my mind, about whether he had deserted and was on the run, hence he was frequently hiding in Louis’ house, or maybe he was still in the employ of the French army and that this had been his assignment all along, to get stranded soldiers out when the occupation came.
But then, why hadn’t he told me? He knew that I was with British intelligence, so why wouldn’t he have shared everything with me? Or, more importantly, why hadn’t Jimmy told me if that was the case? Something was making me feel nervous about the whole affair, something that was making me distrust Joseph even more than I had done before.
I was panicking, particularly as our escape date was less than a week away, and it seemed like I knew next to nothing about the bloke who was claiming to be one of my best friends.
10
I had never felt fear like it. I was genuinely terrified.
There was no way that I would be able to get any sleep tonight, which was
probably for the best as the first phase of our escape was planned for three thirty in the morning. Looking at my watch, I realised that it was midnight already, there wouldn’t be much point in me putting my head down anyway now.
Jacques, Julien and I all sat in Louis’ sitting room, staring into the fire, not saying a single word. There was nothing to be said anymore, we had done all that we could, prepared everything that we were able to. We did the only thing that we could do to ready ourselves now, mental preparation. I hoped that the other two were repeating the whole operation in their minds, our movements and signals that would hopefully get us through to the next phase. I had tried to, but I couldn’t keep my mind focused on what was to come for too long, I could only bring myself to stare into the grate of the fire, hour after hour. Once the time came, we were to simply leave the house, unaccompanied and negotiate our way through the curfewed streets in the dark.
We had made the journey to the school house before, in broad daylight, but in the darkness, it would be a totally different story, especially as we would be using the roads and walkways as little as we possibly could, ducking out of the way of the handful of German troops who patrolled the streets at night.
From there, we would hole up until first light, whereupon we would be taken to another safehouse, closer to the coast, in preparation for the next phase of our escape. The plan that had been laid out on the table before us was a daring one, one that I would rather not have used, but we were assured that it was safe. They had resistance fighters and Germans at the dock that were being paid for us, and it was an especially viable route after a lot of the network had been closed down in and around Paris over the last few months. This was, according to Joseph, our best chance at seeing home again.
