by Thomas Wood
“What is it?” I asked, immediately knowing that something was wrong, something that didn’t involve me for a change.
Dad said nothing, just looked at me, his eyes filling with tears while Mum’s head bobbed up and down in front of his face.
Suddenly it hit me, and I felt sick.
“Bill…” I managed to utter, gaining no other response than my Dad’s pursed lips and a weak attempt at nodding his head. He wiped the back of his hand against his nose, sniffing loudly. I opened my mouth to speak, but no words were forthcoming, I was completely dumbstruck. My Dad answered my question for me, his voice crackling and taking him far too much time to speak a couple of simple sentences.
“We don’t know how. Only that it’s happened. We’ve had no word from the War Office yet, just a letter from one of the boys in his section who said he would explain when he’s back on leave. They’re being withdrawn in about three weeks’ time.”
I sat with them for a few minutes, in contemplation, prayer, numbness, I’m not really too sure now what it was. But in that time that I sat there, nothing went through my mind, other than the picture of my brother, the one who had effectively been a third parent, teaching me the things that I shouldn’t really do, but had marvellous fun doing anyway.
I couldn’t bear to think of him over in Egypt, buried under six feet of desert sand and hoped that one day, we would be able to bury him properly, so that we could visit a decent grave more than anything.
“Promise me, Alf,” she said, looking at me for the first time since I had sat next to her. “Promise me that you’ll be alright. You’ll make it through the war.”
“Of course, I will Mum. You know I will. I’m back in London, you know that.”
I flicked my eyes up at Dad, still hugging Mum into his chest as she sniffed and snuffled her way through the evening. He could tell that I was lying, but he seemed grateful that I had told her what she had wanted to hear regardless.
I had just made a promise that I knew would be difficult to keep, in a church of all the places as well. I felt horribly guilty, but I knew that my duty went far above my mother’s desires to get me home back safe and, deep down, she must have known that herself.
It was a promise that I was going to find exceptionally harder to keep, especially as I kept finding myself volunteering to head back over to occupied Europe, each time seemingly coming closer to dying or finding some other way to ruining my parent’s lives. There was an extra responsibility on me now, now that Bill had gone, and it made me wonder why I kept going back, why I kept volunteering. It was like I was addicted, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to admit it just yet, it was my secret high.
I could quite easily just stay in London like I had told her I would do, I could be quite safe on Floor 424, with no dangers other than getting a severe papercut from all the paperwork I would need to be sorting. Someone else could pick up the brief for this one, and I could operate it from afar, with a similar chance of success, I deduced.
But there was always something drawing me in personally, as if without me, it would all fall to pieces and the work would never be completed. I had to be the one to do all the legwork.
Besides, every time I went back, there was a slim increase in the chances that I would see Cécile again, that she would simply turn up on my doorstep unannounced and offer to help me once again, in the same way that she had done about eighteen months prior.
I was no longer looking forward to the few days that I had planned to spend with my parents, and hoped the morbid air in the house would dissipate due to my arrival. Nonetheless, it did me some good to be back there, to spend some time pretending that there was no war on, that there was no traitor in that small pocket of resistance and most of all, that there was no Geranium.
5
Within seventy-two hours of leaving my parent’s house, I was sat in a motor launch, bouncing my way over the waves as I chugged over towards France. If they could have seen me now, my mother would have been absolutely furious, my father, on the other hand, gave me the impression that he knew that I was going back and, if I had told him, he probably would have been proud of me.
Bill’s death played on my mind for the entire journey back to London, and had been sitting on the peripheries for the whole of my preparation time. Now, as I sat in the back of the boat, it was all I could think about. Bill was dead.
I tried to figure out how he had died, by reading numerous reports about what was going on over in North Africa, and where his regiment might have been operating. But I couldn’t work it out, either way it didn’t change the outcome. Bill would now always be dead. He didn’t get a second chance like I had done, apparently coming back from the dead. His friend had watched him die, there was no way that his letter might have been a mistake.
I felt sick to the very pit of my stomach and I couldn’t determine whether it was on account of the fact that I was reminiscing about my now deceased brother, or if it was down to the pitch and roll of the seaborne vessel that I now found myself perched in. I chuckled to myself, as I thought about the different ways that I had been taken to France. If I had known back in 1939 that being on that Royal Navy destroyer, that was able to cut through every wave with a clinical precision, would have been the most comfortable trip over to the continent, then I would have made much more use of it.
I certainly appreciated it a lot more now, especially after the hairy parachute drop that I had done a few months back, and now being carried across on a small boat that felt like it would capsize at any moment.
ML491, the vessel we were travelling on, had looked sturdy enough from the outside, and I was comforted to see that the exterior had an armour plating running around it, making me feel safer than I had done on any other trip over to France. We were placed in a holding type area at the rear of the ship, which had been converted into a sort of sleeping quarters and office for the officer in charge.
There were around fifteen Royal Navy sailors on this ship, real good chaps, who made sure that our every need was tended to and managed to even knock up a cup of coffee to help try and settle us a little. I marvelled at and admired the sailors, for the way that they could hold themselves on the boat, as if the rocking from side to side was second nature to them and that they didn’t feel queasy in the slightest.
A lot of them were exposed to the elements too, sitting up on deck manning one of the Hotchkiss guns or the machine guns fitted directly above our heads. Many of the others were up on ‘sub watch’, looking out for the sneaking U-Boats that would have great pleasure in watching us all drown. It was why every nook and cranny seemed to be hiding some sort of depth charge ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.
I felt completely washed out by the toing and froing of the boat, and I had only been in there for about six hours, waiting for a go time in what could only be considered a great comfort for wartime.
I tried to distract myself from the unsettled nature of my stomach and the waves that hammered so hard against the bow of the vessel that I thought they were going to break through at any moment, and give me a jolly good soaking. To do it, I began to think about the job at hand, eliminating whoever the informant was for the Germans.
I was convinced that it was Joseph Baudouin, the man that Jimmy had entrusted my life with a few months previously, but the man who I had distrusted wholeheartedly from the moment that I had met him. I hadn’t revealed my suspicions to Jimmy, as I doubted that he would have taken too kindly to one of his best university chums being accused by one of his subordinates. Plus, I didn’t have any solid evidence, just hunches and overthinking.
But, in the back of that motor launch, I tried to think about the facts surrounding Joseph Baudouin, trying to piece together some sort of argument for Jimmy if he was stood right in front of me now. I knew that I should have been going in with a clear mind, suspicious of no one but suspecting everyone, but I couldn’t get him out of my head.
When I had first met him, I had asked to speak to him a
bout his geraniums, and he had subsequently lied to me about what it had meant, telling me that it was a personal handle for himself, that only Jimmy used. Jimmy had known exactly what to have done or said to grab his attention and Geranium was it, but he had dodged the truth.
Two other British officers, aliases Jacques and Julien, had been murdered thanks to a conveniently placed German machine gun on the night of their escape. There seemed no other logical explanation to the events than Joseph Baudouin had been to the Germans, to tell them exactly when and where the evading British men would be. But again, conveniently for Joseph, there were no witnesses, no hard evidence against him, all just conjecture.
Then, I began to think of those around him and the way that they seemed to change as soon as he entered a room, not least my good friend Louis. I would never forget the petrified look in his eye as he stared at me, while embracing his compatriot. There was something in Louis’ eyes that day that told me that I had a great reason to be sceptical of this man and it was then that I had started to truly believe that Joseph was up to something.
I had even blamed Joseph for getting Louis killed, and an untold number of other resistance fighters, by telling the Germans where we were due to be picked up on the night that Rudolf had been killed. There was no way that Louis would have gone to the Germans, there was surely no chance of him being picked up and interrogated by the Germans either. Even if he had, I trusted Louis enough to hold out until well after the flight would have departed before he gave the location away. I trusted Louis with my life. I trusted Joseph with nothing.
Joseph Baudouin was a highly dangerous man and as such, I would need to be exceptionally careful around him if and when our paths crossed again. He knew who I was now, who I worked for, so he would have a pretty good idea about what I was doing back in France again. I would become his number one target on his hitlist, that was for sure.
The only thing that I had in my favour was that he didn’t know that I suspected him yet, at least I hoped he didn’t. I had never made any comments to him or anyone else about the fact that I could not trust him, not even to Louis, so I felt fairly confident in my ability to hide my true reservations over the man.
It was going to be a risky operation, one in which that I would only really have one chance at as, after he saw me, my cover would be blown, and he would almost certainly be in the wind before I so much as blinked. I would, therefore, need to lure him into some sort of trap, one that confirmed my suspicions about him, but also meant that I was able to dispose of him while he was playing into that very same trap. It was something that I had already given much thought, but to no fruition.
There was one person that I longed to have beside me once I landed back in France, the man who had helped me so much already and given his life for the cause. Louis had always seemed so willing and enthusiastic in his desire to assist me, but the amount of firepower that the Germans had been wielding that night on the makeshift airfield, made it incomprehensible to me that he made it out alive. I had got many people killed in the past, my tank gunner and driver; Clarke and Red, I had killed a young commando, Ray for my own gain, even Jacques and Julien’s deaths might have been down to my presence in the area. But none of them had hit me so hard as Louis’ did.
He had nothing, he was used by other people, bullied by them. I had manipulated him by getting alongside him, even feigning a genuine friendship with the man to try and get some additional information out of him. But, now that he was dead, I felt like I had lost a true friend, not just a weak man who pledged allegiance to the one who showed him the most interest.
I would need to do this one alone. It was probably safer for everyone if I kept them all out of it. I had a knack of surviving while everyone else around me found themselves buried under six feet of soil.
However, it wouldn’t stop me from visiting his house, to see if his family still lived there. I hoped to pay my condolences to his family, and to tell them of the promise that I had made to him on the night that he had died. I would try and get them to England, if not now, then after the war was over and there, they would enjoy a fuller, more rewarding life, albeit without the figurehead of their family.
I would also root around in his wife’s knowledge of the resistance network that surrounded her. Maybe there was a chance that I wouldn’t have to do this on my own, there might have been a possibility that she knew of someone along the line that Louis had trusted, someone that I could therefore place my faith in. If not, it wouldn’t have been an entirely wasted journey.
My mind moved from one person who had helped me to another. Cécile had found me lying on a table of a French farm labourer, trying to recover from a gunshot wound to my lower abdomen. From there she had helped to arrange and be with me as I was passed from one friendly French civilian to another, all the way into Paris, until she had finally been compromised, leaving me stranded and on my own, in the middle of an enemy occupied capital city.
Rudolf had said as he lay dying that she was safe, and that she had been on her way back to the States the last he knew of her. I had been overjoyed at the news, but it was only sometime later that I began to realise that I had no way of confirming his story. How was I to know that he wasn’t just telling me lies and it hadn’t been he himself who had stuck a bullet into her skull in some darkened alley, behind the Gestapo headquarters? How was I to know that it wasn’t all a ploy by him, to make sure that I felt like I had a reason to live, a reason to get on that plane and live to find her again.
It would have made sense for him to lie, that way, he knew that I would want to escape with my life, but also escaping with my life meant that I got away with his intelligence. Rudolf had been a clever man, he wouldn’t have been made a Standartenführer in the SS, one of the most brutal yet effective organisations in the whole world right now, and it didn’t seem too outrageous to think that he had in some way played me. Everyone else seemed to, so why shouldn’t he?
As I thought about the possibility that she was alive, and that Rudolf had been telling the truth, I began to feel anxious about her potential route home. Even for her, a Red Cross nurse, the journey back to the States would now be just as treacherous as my journey back to Britain had been.
The United States had had several of their ships destroyed or damaged by German mines and one ship had even been sunk leading to over one hundred and fifty Americans needing to be rescued from the sea. I tried to put the images out of my mind, there was always a possibility that she had stayed in the south of France, or perhaps managed to move herself to one of the neutral countries in Europe, Switzerland perhaps, where I heard that the Red Cross there was constantly expanding its services.
I worried about her perpetually, and prayed that she had in fact made it back to the States after all, as I was convinced that the whole of Europe, and possibly America as well, would soon be dragged into this war, the rationales for doing so constantly blurred by the ever-increasing number of combatants.
“So, we ain’t allowed to know what you’re doing at all? You can’t even give us a clue?”
“Yeah, c’mon, give us a clue mate. Why you wearing civvies? You SOE?”
“Nope. I can’t tell you a thing. Even if I could I wouldn’t.” The boys that would act as a diversionary force had been bantering and teasing one another for the whole journey, in between cleaning their weapons and making sure everything would go bang when it needed to.
But now, they had turned onto why I was in the boat with them, a mysterious and coy bloke, dressed in civilian clothing and carrying French identification papers.
“We’ve dropped your type off before you know. You can trust us.”
“Yeah I know I can. But how many times have you been interrogated by the Gestapo? As soon as they start pulling your finger nails off I’m sure you’ll spill the beans about me.”
“Alright mate, keep it light. Know what I mean?” he said, chuckling. They were all pragmatists, they knew what the reality of being in this kind of war me
ant for them, but they didn’t need to be reminded about it by some bloke they’d just met.
Their job was to land on the beach with me, skirting up the coast to the east, before trying to observe a target defence, with the view to try and take one or two Germans back across the water for a little extended holiday. By their reckoning, most of the soldiers stationed around here were ancient or barely out of nappies, which should make their little night trip to France that much easier.
“Okay then chaps,” said the sub-lieutenant, poking his head down the stairs that led up onto the deck, “five minutes, then we’ll load you up. Okay?”
There were a few muttered agreements as we began collecting weapons up; submachine guns, grenades and explosives for them, a single, small underpowered pistol for me.
“I’m meeting with the resistance. They have a couple of issues, see.”
“Oh okay,” said one of them, drawing out each word for so long that it matched the drone of the engine. “So, you are SOE then, ain’t ya?”
I kept quiet for a few moments, hoping that my silence would pay off with a similar silence from the commandos, but I was wrong, they were an inquisitive bunch.
“I’ve always fancied myself as being a bit like you lot, you know. Sneaking around, sticking a knife in Hitler, chatting up the French birds, that sort of thing.” He began chuckling, as did a few of the others with him while we began to make for the stairway. As I reached the bottom step, I realised I was too, I was almost enjoying myself.
“So how did you get into all that then mate? I might give it a go.” Piped up one of the others from behind me.
“Oh, that’s a long old story. I’ll probably have to tell you that one next time I see you.”
6
Within seconds of being in the Assault Landing Craft, I immediately began to pine for the Motor Launch, its comparable stability and robustness against the vigour of the oncoming waves far favourable to a man who was not used to being out at sea.
