by Thomas Wood
We gradually picked up speed, to the point where I thought we would be taking off at any second, which is why I was so shocked to see the little bright orange flashes of German tracer rounds zipping past us on either side of the cockpit. It was almost as if the little bullets were jealous that I was getting away, as if they wanted to be a part of whatever this was and wanted to hitch a ride back to England with us.
The faster we got, the brighter the flashes became, each one of them beginning to morph into nothing more than a constant orangey glow on either side of the cockpit. This was really bad news, the tracer would have been in one in every four or five rounds, which meant that for every bright light that I could see whizzing past my cockpit, there was another three or four rounds sharing the same airspace; plenty to fill the night air with such a concentration that it was only a matter of time before we started taking direct hits.
Once those direct hits began to come in, I would have a few concerns over what they would hit. The first would be the pilot as, without him, I would be getting nowhere. The second was the engine; superficial strikes to the fuselage we could probably take but taking one to the engine compartment or other vital area like the fuel tank, would mean that we were heading towards the same fate as Rudolf. The third and final place where I didn’t want to see a round was in myself. I felt like I deserved it now, I had come so far and dealt with so much that to be hit with a bullet this late on in the game would seem desperately unfair to me.
Until that point, I had kept my head facing straight forwards, boring my eyes into the back of the pilot’s seat and trying to see what he was doing up ahead of me by pressing my head against the canopy and sneaking a look down the sides.
Now though, I felt so utterly helpless, everyone else was in control of my fate, so I thought it would be okay for me to take a reprieve and examine the situation outside. Turning my head slightly so that I was looking over my left shoulder, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.
I couldn’t make out figures anymore, no more blackened silhouettes, all I could see was the entire treeline behind us erupting in flashes of light, accompanied by the vibrant fireflies of tracer rounds as they sped towards us. The Germans had broken out from the safety of the treeline, clearly confident that nothing would be firing back at them anytime soon.
It meant that the resistance fighters were all but eradicated and I began to hope sincerely that Louis had either not been with them, or that he had the presence of mind to withdraw as soon as the Germans had made an appearance. Neither eventuality had seemed likely given the loyal nature of Louis’ personality.
I wondered for a moment if there were even any of Louis’ men left, and whether they would be able to continue the fight in this small part of France, or if that was it now for them. Joseph would have to wait a number of years until boys like Louis’ son were old enough to join in the fight himself. I prayed earnestly that by the time Louis’ son had made it to a reasonable fighting age that Joseph was either dead or out of the picture completely. I had a strong foreboding feeling that Joseph would send many more of his men needlessly to their deaths by the end of the war, due to his ineptitude and poor handling of situations.
The more I looked around, the more despondent I became. Tracer had now joined in from every angle it seemed, the only place it didn’t emanate from was the treeline directly in front of us, the one that was looming ever larger the faster we got.
I entertained myself with the notion that I hoped a few of the German’s stray rounds were catching one another on the far side of the field, and wondered what kind of incapable officer was commanding the troops on the ground in such a way that he let them put themselves at so great a risk. A resurgence of joy appeared at the thought that maybe one side weren’t Germans at all and that the resistance fighters were still there, still making a stand, right until the bitter end. If it was them, then I knew that they would stay there long into the night, long after I had departed, to make sure that they took down as many of the oppressive regime’s soldiers as they possibly could. They were good men. They were brave men. But before too long, I was sure they would be dead men.
The plane felt like it was moving at a lightning speed and yet, we were no closer to being able to take off than when I first got in the aircraft. The more we trundled along that stretch of grass, the longer we were a target for the Germans, who were apparently terrible shots in this neck of the woods.
No sooner had I thought that, then they had zeroed their weapons in and checked their fire, as the tracer rounds that zipped past the cockpit windows slowed down in intensity and they soon began pinging themselves into the fuselage of the plane.
The dang dang dang of small arms fire hitting the side of the aircraft became even more prominent than the roar of the screaming engine, and I managed to convince myself that at any second, one round would get lucky and send us into a huge engulfing fireball that would swallow me up whole, without a chance to bail out.
“Can’t you make this thing go any faster?” I screamed at him, not caring that it would be blaring straight into his earholes. The louder my message was the quicker I hoped it would seep through into his brain. “Come on! Let’s go up!”
I began panicking and getting myself increasingly flustered as I was forced to watch round after round coming straight towards me, with nowhere for me to fling myself that offered any kind of real protection. I continued screaming and shouting at the pilot, with the intercom switched off, to at least give him some sort of silence to work with.
With an almighty roar from me, the plane suddenly seemed to buck its ideas up and the nose of the aircraft suddenly lifted violently, making me feel altogether lonely as I was the last one left on the ground.
Just as I felt that I would be left behind by the rest of the aircraft, my skull was sent crashing into the back of my seat as we lurched forwards and upwards, and I closed my eyes as I braced myself for an immediate impact with the row of trees that we had got so close to. Even with my eyes clamped tightly shut, I could still make out the individual strands of tracer rounds as they lit up small pockets of the night sky and I had to force myself to keep them shut until we were well up into the air.
There was nothing I could do about those individual rounds now, I told myself repeatedly.
As we continued to crawl up into the night sky, it was only the heavier machine guns that were able to get anywhere close to us, but their arcs of fire soon became ineffective and the only thing left to fill my eardrums was the howl of the engine as we made for home.
The roar was quickly replaced by another disturbing noise, as I realised that my pilot was cackling hysterically, and I could make out the movements of his head as he threw it backwards and forwards like a possessed man.
“Whoo hoo!” He screamed triumphantly, “How brilliant was that!” I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry, my natural reaction was to take my pistol and bury a round in the back of his head for being so downright stupid.
“Whose idea was it that this was a good way to get people out?!” I screamed at him.
“I don’t know…but I’m going to find out and thank him! That was the most exciting thing I’ve ever done!”
28
There is no greater feeling than realising that you are floating up high in the air, especially when you were previously rooted to the ground, quite quickly feeling yourself being surrounded from all sides. I had been chased and hounded by the Germans in those last few minutes in France, but it was not them that had begun to force their hands around my neck, it was not them who had begun to press down on my windpipe so hard that I was struggling to breath.
I was being suffocated by something else, something far wider and more complex than the Germans and their desire to see me slaughtered in the most brutal way possible.
The freedom that I had experienced was slowly being taken away from me, the forces had been closing in and in, that small pocket of land had been my last chance at breaking away from it all. Th
e plane had offered me that hope, had offered me that way from breaking out of France and out of the cycle of finding things out, through people who should have no other knowledge of what was going on.
As the revs were brought down slightly, as we hit our more comfortable cruising altitude, I couldn’t help but think that being up in the sky was the safest place for me to be right now. I didn’t know who I could trust or who was on my side, but being up there with my pilot, I felt the most secure that I had done in months, if not years.
Maybe that was the answer to it all; to float around in the skies forever. Physically, it was an impossibility, but I knew of ways that I could do it. I was knowledgeable enough to conjure up an idea or two of how I could put an end to it altogether. But then I thought of my parents, I thought of my brother Bill and how, if they were all still alive, how they would be bitterly disappointed to discover that I had ended it all in the way that I had been thinking. I owed it to them to keep fighting, to keep plodding on, until I felt the time was right to stop.
As I stared out over the inky black landscape of France, the place where I had spent so much of my recent time running and keeping my head down, I began to think of Rudolf, and wondered if he had taken the route out that I was considering.
He seemed like an honourable man, the kind who had pushed patriotism and loyalty aside and pulled the cloak of morality and decency on, right when it had mattered the most. He didn’t strike me as the kind of man that would allow himself to be captured and arrested, not least by his own countrymen and so, there was a decent chance that Rudolf had ended his own life, taking many more secrets than he had been able to tell me to the grave with him.
I felt sorry for his wife and daughter, especially now that I had had plenty of time to think everything through and meditate upon it. He would be leaving a huge hole in their lives, and for what? The war would still be raging on tomorrow, it would still be being fought next week and I was almost certain that men would be thrown before machine guns for another year at the very least. All he had managed to do was to pass some information onto me, a selfish, untrustworthy and unreliable man, who didn’t even know if he had the courage to speak up about what Rudolf had told him, let alone act upon it in the way that he would have wanted.
Sitting in the back of the aircraft, noticing that there was only room for one passenger in the back, I wasn’t scared to let my tears fall from my face freely, in the hope that it would act as some sort of catharsis and that, by the time we had landed, my head would all be in order, the memories of the men that I had sent to their deaths wiped from my recollections. I hoped too that, by the time we touched down, that I would have had enough courage stored up in the bowels of my mind to say something to someone about what Rudolf had told me.
What he had whispered to me in what would have undoubtedly been his last piece of human interaction, had changed everything. It had changed my perception of the very people that I trusted, and the ones that I didn’t. It had altered the way that I had thought even about myself and that he had somehow triggered off some sort of vindication process in me, that I did not think possible until that night.
It was possible, according to Rudolf’s testimony, that it hadn’t even been my fault that he had landed up in the way that he was. It was apparently within reason to assume that his death had not been down to me. What had caught my attention even more than that though, was the fact that it was now possible for me to believe that I hadn’t even been responsible for Cécile being compromised back in Paris; it wasn’t me being careless talking to the priest, it wasn’t me making an error while we were checking in to the Hotel La Romaine, it wasn’t even me looking at the German soldiers in some Parisian restaurant in the wrong way. It was, according to Rudolf, inevitable that Cécile would be compromised, no matter what I had done to maintain my cover, she was always going to be caught.
I didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t know how to react. My natural instinct had been to stay in France and begin tracking her down to the very best of my ability, so that we could be reunited once more. But the other half of me was torn in the opposite direction; to head back to England and act upon the intelligence that Rudolf had managed to slip from his mouth.
It got me thinking though, about Cécile, and whether or not she knew that I was still alive and that I had been in France again until very recently. I prayed that the note that I had passed to German Frankie had somehow managed to find its way to her and that she had at least found out of my escape.
The aircraft began to shake from side to side, sloshing my insides all over the place, matching the mess that was my state of mind. The moon still shone brighter than anything that I could make out, its brilliant white light seemingly even brighter than the sun had ever been. I checked my watch; four fifteen in the morning, only a few more hours till sunrise, by which time I was hoping that we would be safely back in England, which is where I intended to stay for far longer than I had done last time. I wondered if that desire would actually materialise in reality, or whether I would be swiftly moved on elsewhere, to fight Jimmy’s war for him in some other occupied country where it seemed everyone wanted to put a bullet in my brain.
I could make out the vague outlines of small towns and villages as we glided high above them and I wondered how many men were down there pining for home. How many were there that would have given anything to have been on this plane right now?
Some of them had been like Jacques and Julien, working the French land until such a point where they had enough money and identity papers to make the journey south. Others, I assumed, had been spirited away by men like Louis, offering them pint after pint of milk to drink, so that they could build their strength up to a point where they could simply walk all the way to Switzerland or Gibraltar. I said a quick and silent prayer for them, but also resolved with myself that I owed it to all of them, to continue the fight as soon as I made it back to England. I had their lives in my hands now, on my conscience, and I couldn’t afford to let a single one of them down. Not one of them deserved to die. I was going to keep them alive.
I made it my mission to try and save as many lives as possible during the remainder of this vicious conflict, instead of trying to focus on my own self-preservation and needs. Cécile, by now, was on a ship back to America, deported from the country that she had learnt to love, to serve. For me, she was safe, she was out of the war completely, and it would be my duty to try and bring that very war to a swift close, so that I could travel to America the minute the armistice was signed and find her in a peaceful country.
In amongst my self-celebration that I had decided to save so many lives, I realised that I had got Louis killed. He had been the one that had kept me alive for so long, not least with all the milk that he forced down my throat. He had been a good man, a loyal, trusted friend, but I had put him in a situation where he would have sacrificed himself, just so that Rudolf and I would have a better chance at making it to England.
I owed it to him to make good my promise, that I would try my hardest to get his wife and son out of France and to England, where they would be safe. It would be no easy task and I had no way of knowing if it was actually possible, but it was my duty to see them safely in England, even if that meant fulfilling my promise after the hostilities had ceased.
I shut my eyes, the stinging so great that my eyes filled with tears trying to bring me some sort of meagre relief. I rubbed my hands up and down over my face for the next ten minutes or so, trying to recalibrate my mind so I could restart from scratch the minute that I had landed.
A voice suddenly popped into my head and it took me a while to realise that it was the calm, irritating voice of the pilot sitting in front of me that had spoken.
“There we are Sir, we are officially out of France. Not long till we’re back now.”
Out of France. The words sounded even sweeter the more that I repeated them back to myself, but I couldn’t shake the feelings of guilt and shame the happier that I became.
I had sacrificed a great deal of people, all for my selfish gain. I had taken Rudolf at his word because he had mentioned Cécile, subsequently sacrificing his life, and the lives of many other men as they fought to secure our withdrawal.
I had given up on the raiding soldiers who I had greeted on the beach so many days ago now. I tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that they were good soldiers, resourceful men, but I couldn’t neglect the notion that I had simply abandoned them and left them to fend totally for themselves in a hostile country. I could only hope that they would find a man like Louis that was willing to help them and, if necessary, lay down his life for them.
“You okay back there?” The voice crackled over the intercom once more, probably because I’d hardly said a word for the entire trip.
“Yeah…yeah, of course. Looking forward to getting back home, I’m absolutely shattered.”
“I bet you are Sir, if that take off was anything to go by. Don’t worry, couple of hours’ time and you’ll be tucked up nice and cosy in that bed of yours. Put this all behind you.”
I couldn’t help but smile at his optimism. In bed in a couple of hours? Somehow, based on my previous experiences, I doubted that the big wigs in MI9 were going to allow that.
Nevertheless, I kept the image in my head, right until the moment that we began our final approach back into England.
29
I had been right about not being able to be all cosy and tucked up in bed within a few hours. In minutes, I was being whisked off the airfield in a rather swish staff car, one that had more leg room than I could ever wish for, but that somehow made me feel intensely lonely with a shade of apprehension at what was to come.
